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NEW YORK IN FICTION 




X 3 



NEW YORK 
IN FICTION 

By 
ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE 

ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK ' DODD, MEAD 
AND COMPANY • MDCCCCl 



VC)rQt 



Fjz2 



Copyright iSgg, igoo, by ,/ \^0 
DoDD, Mead and Company 



Library of Coniprress! 

Iwu Copies Receweo 
FEB 18 1901 



Mo. 



SECOND COPY 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



0' 



^ 







'}■ 



To Mr SISTER 



INTRODUCTORY 

AS the years pass it is becoming gen- 
erally understood, that the great 
American novel, of which we have 
heard so much and for which we have 
been waiting so long, must be in every 
sense free from provincialism and local- 
ism. For instance, it cannot be distinct- 
ively a story of the Creoles of Louisiana, 
or of Greorgia plantation life, or of the 
Crackers of North Carolina, or of the 
ranch, the mining-camp, the chaparral, 
or of the people of Maine, or of the people 
of Western New York. There must be a 
broad canvas : it must deal with the great 
common principles of our national life ; 
its characters must be Americans, not 
Virginians or Texans or Kansans or 
Greorgians. The many novels of recent 



IN TROD UCTORY 



years which have been hailed as the 
great American novel — King Noanett 
and Hugh Wynne and, of late, Richard 
Carvel and Janice Meredith and To Have 
and to Hold — all have dealt with periods 
when American life was confined to a 
region that extended only a few hnndred 
miles inland from the Atlantic coast. 
The vastness, the complexity of modern 
life, were absent. The Civil War is to all 
practical purposes a virgin literary field. 
The stories that we have had of it have 
been almost entirely tales of the battle- 
field, the camp, the bivouac, — all trumpet 
call and smoke and cannon glare ; the life 
behind we have not seen, nor the wide 
and tremendous moral and geographical 
sweep of that struggle, nor its influence 
on homely destinies, on obscure lives. 
For instance, to take up a tale that is old 
and yet ever new, the marvel of Vanity 
Fair is in the manner in which Thackeray 
bound up the life of an insignificant little 
English girl, living quietly by Blooms- 



INTRODUCTORY 



bury Square, in the last fateful rush of 
the Imperial eagles. Indeed, an Ameri- 
can novelist might do worse than boldly 
to take a few ideas from the Waterloo 
chapters and paint for us the rout of 
senators, congressmen, lobbyists, adven- 
turesses — the pageant of frills and furbe- 
lows and champagne hampers moving 
out gaily from Washington to the battle- 
field of Bull Run, which was to be a 
spectacle, a sort of opera bouffe — with 
just enough of carnage and bloodshed to 
stimulate properly the emotions; then, 
later, the horror, the grim humour of 
that frenzied flight. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

IXTRODUCTORY ix 

I'aIM I. ()l,D AND PUOLKTAUIAN NeW YoHK 

I. The Novelist Topographically Considered . . 3 
II. About the Battery, Bowling Green and Lower 

Broadway 14 

III. Park Row in Fiction 32 

IV. The Politician as Literary iNIaterial .... 45 
V. The Great East Side 61 

Part II. About Washington Square 

I. The Historical Novel of the Future .... 89 

II. Washington Square 94 

III. Bohemia 10(! 

IV. The New York of Davis and Fawcett . . . r2() 
V. Gramercy Park, Second Avenue and Colonel 

Carter's Haunts 129 

Pai;i' III, The Xew City and Suburban New 
York 

I. Neglected Phases of New York Life . . . 1;"»3 

II. Altout Madison Square 105 

HI. The Park and the Upper East and West Sides 1 77 

IV. Harlem Heights and Westchester . . . . 1S9 

V. Green point, Staten Island, and New Jersey . 213 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

" The Willis of the church dimly glaring under the trees 

beyond." — Irving's " Leyend ol' Sieepij Hollow" Front ispifce 

The Heart of the Old City 5 

"Tlie little red box of Vesey Street." — Bunner 15 

Jacob Dolph's House, No. 7 State Street. — Bunner .... 19 
Home of the Lauderdales. — F. Marion Crawford's " Katherine 

Lauderdale" and " The Hal stons" 25 

Printing-House Square and Park Row 33 

The City Editor's Desk. — ./. L. Williams's " The Citij Editor's 

Conscience " 37 

Monkey Hill 41 

" A little park, too small to be called a square, even if its shape 

had not been a triangle." — P. L. Ford's " The Honourable 

Peter Stirliiuj " 55 

Saloon of Dennis Moriarty 58 

The Niantic, Exchange Place. — Townsend's " A Daughter of 

the Tenements " 59 

Case'.s Tenement, Hester Street. — Richard Harding Davis . iV2 
" Big Barracks " Tenement, Forsythe Street. — Julian Ralph's 

^^ People We Pass" 65 

Pay-Day in the Sweatshop. — Cohan's '^ Yekl" 71 

The Great Synagogue of the Ghetto, Norfolk Street — 

Cahans " The Imported Bridegroom " 73 

Study rooms, the Great Synagogue, Norfolk Street. — 

Cahan's " The Inijiorted Bridegroom " 75 

The Church where the White Slaves died, Mott and Park 

Streets. — Townsend's " The House of Yellow Brick " . 77 
XV 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Page 
" The House of Yellow Brick," Pell Street. — E. W. Townsend 80 
" A narrow, worn pair of stone steps running up alongside 

an old three-story brick building/' — Townsend's "A 

Daiif/hter of the Tenemeyits" 82 

Newsboys' Lodging House, where Townsend found " Cliimmie 

Fadden" 84 

The Slojier Residence. — IJcii'-i/ ./anifs's " Wdshimjlon S'liiarc " 96 
The Monastery — Washington S([uarc. — Robert C/itniibers's 

'^ Outsiders" (iiid " The King in Yellow'" 101 

Captain Peters's Home — Washington S(inare — Biinner's 

"The Midge" 104 

Clirysalis College. — Tluodorc Winthro/i's " Cecil Dreeme " . 107 
The Garibaldi's Barred Window. — James L. Ford's " Bohemia 

hivaded" 110 

The Casa Napoleon. — Janvier and lloirells 115 

In the Casa Napoleon. — Janrier and Iloirells 118 

Where Van Bilil)er found the Runaway Couple. — It. H. 

Daris's'* \'an Biliher as Best Man" 123 

Where Van Bibber found tiie Burglar. — /?.//. L»«/vs . . . 124 
House before wliicli Lena died. — E. \V. Toirnsend's " Bi/ 

Whom the Offence Cometh" 125 

No. 68 Clinton Place. — Janvier's " A Temporary Deadlock" . 128 

The Crowilies' Home — Lafayette Place. — F. Marion Craw- 
ford's " The Ralstons " 1.3.3 

Ernest Neuman's Home. — Ilenn/ llarland's "As It Was 

Written " 137 

Larry Laughton's Home. — Brandir Mattheirs's "The Last 

Meeting" 139 

Mrs. Leroy's House — Gramercy Park. — /•'. Ilnjil-insan 

Smith's " Calel> West" 142 

Royal Weldon's Home — Gramercy Park. — Edgar Sedtus's 

" Tristrent Varick '' 143 

xvi 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Page 

Colouel Carter's Gate — Present Day. — F. /lopkinson Smith's 

"Colonel Carter of Caiiersi'l/le " 14() 

" The fire is my friend," said Colojiel Carter — Colonel 
Carter's Fireplace. — F. Ilopkinson Smith's " Colonel 

Carter of Cartersville" 147 

The Berkeley. — R. H.Davis To face 164 

Ezra Pierce Home. — Brander Mattlieirs's " flis Father's Son " 1G7 
" The Little Cluuxh around the Corner." — I>auis and ^fat- 

theirs 171 

Manhattan Club. — P. L. Ford's " Tiw Ilonourahle Peter Stir- 
ling" 174 

"Poverty Flat." — J. Z. /'V(/ 176 

" The river, tlie penitentiary, and the smoke from the oil 

factories of Hunter's Point " 1 78 

The Terrace. — II. Ilarland's " As It Was Written" . . . 180 

Mrs. Pei.Kada's Home. — H. Ilarland's "Mrs. Peixada" . . 181 

Tiluski's Home. — //. //ar/((Mf/'.s " ^l,s- 7MK((.s lFa7/(?H " . . 183 

Scene of J. L. Williams's " Mrs. Harrison Wells's Shoes " 184 

" Van Bibber and the Swan-Boats." — R. II. Davis . . . 1^5 

Joiin Lennox's House. — Westcott's " David Ilarum" . . . 187 
"The long stretch by the reservoir." — P. L. Ford's " The 

Ilonourahle Peter Stirling " 188 

Squatter Territory. — Edgar Fawcett's ''The Confessions of 

Claud " 190 

Tiie Jumel House. — A Reputed Refuge of Ilarveij Birch . . 19.'? 

The Roger Morris House — Washington's IIead(|uarters. — 

P. L. Ford's "Janice Meredith" 197 

" The road winding around little hills." — " The Spi/ " . . . 1 99 

Harvey Birch's Cave — Washington Rocks 201 

Residence of " His Whiskers." — E. W. Townsend's " Chimmie 

Fadden" 203 

xvii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Page 

" The most delightful of French inns." — F. Ilophinson 

Smith's " A D(iy at Lwjuerre's " 207 

Hhe OV\W\\\. — Geoff,e!j Crayon's'' Chronicles" 210 

" Flocks of white (lucks paildling together." — F. HopJcinson 

Smith's "^1 Day at Lai/aerrc's" 211 

"The inky creek and flat niarsii land." — Edgar Fatccett's 

" An Ambitious Woman " 214 

" That hroad expansion of the river denominated by tlie 

Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee " 215 

Tom Grogan's House 218 

The Andre Tree and Monument. — Irving's " Lei/end of Sleepy 

Hollow" 219 

Tom Grogan's Barn 221 

"The sea wall that Babcock was building for the Lightliouse 

Department." — F. Ilopkinson Smith's " Tom Grogan" . 223 

" Nassau Hall, then serviug as barracks for the force centred 

there." — P. L. Ford's " Janice Meredith," ch. .ttxH. . . 227 

"Glimpses of the Raritan, over fields of stubble and corn- 
stacks, broken by patches of timber and orchanl." — 
P. L. Ford's" Janice Meredith," rh. Hi 228 

Greenwood, the Home of the Merediths. — P. L. Ford's 

" Janice Meredith " 229 



patt £Dnc 

OLD AND PROLETARIAN 
NEW YORK 



New York in Fiction 



pavt €>ne 

I. THE XOVELISTS GEOGRAPHICALLY 
CONSIDERED 

IT would be useless to attempt to 
treat the streets and haunts of any 
individual New York novelist as the 
London of Charles Dickens has been very 
often treated, as the London of Thack- 
eray has been treated once or twice, 
notably in Mr. William H. Rideing's en- 
tertaining Thacheray^ s London^ a book 
which, however, deals as much with the 
London in which Thackeray lived as the 
London of which Thackeray wrote ; and 
as the Paris of Honore de Balzac might 
be admirably treated by a Parisian who 
brought to the task an infinite patience, 
industry, and sympathy. In the first 
place, there is no writer sufficiently dom- 
inant. With a few notable exceptions, 
the novelists who have written of New 

3 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

York life have made very little use of its 
local colour. Certaiu phases of its socio- 
logical life have been entirely ignored. 
The reader who spends very many hours 
with books of New York fiction often 
finds, after wading through a thick vol- 
ume that at first sight seems as if it must 
be drenched with the s^^irit of the city, 
nothing l^eyond the information that 
some individual — usually of no vital im- 
portance to the narrative — lived, let us 
say, on West Thirty-seventh Street or 
somewhere on the East Side. A resi- 
dence on West Thirty-seventh Street is 
quite meaningless, and the " East Side " 
is very vast and unsatisfying and non- 
committal. The fault, however, does not 
lie entirely with the novelists. 

It was in 1807 that the City Commis- 
sioners, with a curious disregard of what 
succeeding generations of New Yorkers 
might have to say in the matter, mapped 
out the entire island north of Waverley 
Place into squares. Then and there was 

4 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

dealt a vital blow to the fiction that was 
to deal with the city's life. Since that 
time New York has undergone almost 
with every decade kaleidoscopic changes. 
Whole neighbourhoods have become ob- 
solete. It is only of recent years that the 
traditions and the associations of the old 
town have had a meaning, that the 
streets have been more than mere thor- 
oughfares. This change has been largely 
due to the revival of interest in the liter- 
ature dealing with the subject, — to the 
letters of the late *' Felix Oldboy," to 
Mr. Haswell's Reminiscences of an Octo- 
genarkm, to Mr. Thomas Janvier's In 
Old New York, and Mr. Dayton's Last 
Days of Knicl-erhocJier Life. However, 
the poetic, the symbolic side is absent. 
New York has yet to be shown to us as 
living, feverish, incarnate. 

Every American who has passed his 
ten days in the French capital knows or 
ought to know the Rue Racine, the Rue 
Balzac, the Boulevard Voltaire, the Rue 

7 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Alexandre Dumas, and so forth. The 
time must come when London and New 
York will be equally appreciative and 
realise the rich possibilities of national, 
literary, artistic, and musical figures in 
street nomenclature. The most super- 
ficial observer of American life must be 
impressed by the cheerless and monot- 
onous sameness in the street names of 
smaller American cities and towns. The 
ubiquitous Main Street is probably the 
Americanisation of the very British High 
Street. Every town has its Poplar, Elm, 
Cherry, Maple Street or Avenue, all quite 
meaningless and absurd. There was a 
time when all rural hotels were Wash- 
ingtons, Franklins, Jeffersons, — a sturdy 
l^atriotic form of nomenclature far pref- 
erable to the present flabby tendency 
toward Marlboroughs and Cavendishes 
and Wellingtons. 

So it is very true and very pitiful that 
the great majority of the named New 
York streets have no significance what- 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

ever to the average New Yorker. He 
reads Cortlandt, Barclay, Reade, Riving- 
toii, or Grreat Jones on the lamp-post — 
that is all. On the other hand, the Pa- 
risian groeer knows that Rivoli and Ans- 
terlitz were great French battles, that 
Voltaire and Rabelais were great think- 
ers, that the street leading np to the 
Pantheon is named after the designer ot* 
that mansoleum of " touted Jes (jloires de la 
Francey One thing in favour of naming 
streets after men of letters and artists is 
that these names are not likely to be af- 
fected by political changes. We find 
hugely ridiculous the strange succession 
of names that a Paris street has borne as 
France became Revolutionary, Royalist, 
Bonapartist, or Republican. We forget 
that New York once had a King Street, 
a Queen Street, a Crown Street, and a 
George Street. Time may come when 
this question will receive its proper con- 
sideration. We do not despair of seeing 
a Richard Harding Davis Alley some- 

9 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

where between Fifth and Madison Ave- 
nue, or a court on the lower East Side 
named after Mr. Townsend or Mr. 
Stephen Crane. Chicago may thus im- 
mortaUse her H. Chatfield-Chatfield Tay- 
lor, and Brooklyn, with characteristic 
discrimination and literary taste, will 
unquestionably vote the construction of 
a spacious and flowery Laura Jean Lib- 
bey Boulevard. 

In the concluding chapter of Le Pere 
Goriot^ Balzac made Eugene de Ras- 
tignac declare war against Paris from 
the heights of the cemetery of Pere La- 
chaise; Zola, standing with the Abbe 
Pierre on the sacred crest of Montmartre, 
sees the great city lying like a gigantic 
lizard in the sun; always a personified, 
capricious, changing Paris, now " a Paris 
of mystery, shrouded by clouds," " Paris 
which the divine sun had sown with 
light ; " Tennyson is rapt in contem- 
plation of the lights of London, lurid 
against the sky; it is impossible not to 

10 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

feel the splendid significance of Thack- 
eray's " great squares and streets of 
Vanity Fair;" Dickens, studying Lon- 
don from London Bridge, is submerged, 
swept out of himself, by its incarnate 
immensity and mystery. But Dickens's 
sweeps and orphans and beadles were 
English; the human dregs who people 
Balzac's books, or Eugene Sue's, or Guy 
de Maupassant's, or Emile Zola's are 
Frenchmen; whereas, between the New 
York novelist, who wishes to deal with 
proletarian types, and his subject there 
is usually the barrier of race. The nov- 
elists who have made the most of the 
city's streets as backgrounds are, as a 
rule, associated with certain quarters 
and phases of the metropolis. Thus, 
Richard Harding Davis, who during the 
last few years has in his books forsaken 
both New York and Philadelphia, his 
first love, for the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean and imaginary South American 
republics, wrote best of Fifth Avenue — 

11 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Fifth Avenue between Waverley Place 
and the Plaza — the frock-coated, top- 
hatted, five-o'clock-in-the-afternoon world 
which ignores the great stretch of the 
city that lies between Washington Square 
and Fulton Street ; Henry Harland ( Sid- 
ney Luska), in his earlier and more vig- 
orous work (the work done at three 
o'clock in the morning with a wet towel 
bound around his head), delighted in 
quaint streets and houses of the upper 
East Side overlooking the river; Edgar 
Fawcett, in Squatter territory and in old 
Second Avenue; F. Hopkinson Smith, 
in that part of New York which lies 
near the clock tower of Jefferson Market, 
although he can also write very enter- 
tainingly of Washington Square and 
Gramercy Park and Staten Island; Ed- 
ward W. Townsend, in Chinatown and 
Mulberry Bend; Abraham Cahan, in the 
Ghetto ; Thomas Janvier, in West Ninth 
Street and Tompkins Square. It is the 
same with Buinier, with Marion Craw- 

12 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

ford, with Howells, Henry James, Julian 
Ralph, Stephen Crane, Brander Matthews. 
Among those men who seem so thor- 
oughly enamoured of the city's history 
and traditions as to have been strongly 
moved by its rush and turmoil and per- 
plexity, Bunner is unique. He once 
wrote somewhere : 

" Why do I love New York, my dear? 
I do not know ; were my father here, 
And his^ and ins, tlie three and I 
Miglit between ns make yon some reply." 

His affection for the old town was 
very profound and sincere. He felt very 
keenly the significance of the phrase, 
" little old New York," — a phrase w^hich, 
though applied to a city that is not so 
very old and is certainly not little, is 
none the less sincere and sympathetic. 
In his books he makes us feel how much 
he would have liked to see the old 
beaux w^ith theii- bell-crown hats ogling 
the crinolined ladies on lower Broadway 
of a spring or a summer afternoon. How 

13 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

he pored over the old chronicles in the 
hope of seeing the ghosts of old vanities 
and follies and wickednesses rise up ont 
of their graves and dance, smirk, and 
gibber again ! 



II. THE BATTERY — BOWLING GREEN — WALL 
STREET — BUNNER'S NEW YORK 

Of the city of the poets and novelists 
of the first half of the century there is 
but little trace. The quaint homes of 
the people of Irving's Kniclxerhoclier His- 
torj) of New York belong to the irrev- 
ocable past; the Broadway of which 
Paulding, Halleck, Willis, Drake, and 
Clarke, the "mad poet," sung, is very 
different from the Broadway of the clos- 
ing years of the century. We can find 
the cottage at Fordham in which Poe 
lived, and follow Cooper's Harvey Birch 
through rapidly changing Westchester, 
but the New York of brick and stone 
belongs essentially to the work of the 

14 




"the little red box of VESEY street." — BUNNER. 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 



younger literary generation. Bunner 
seems to be equally at home in the old 
town, in Grreenwicli village, and about 
Washington Square. In one of his later 
poems he told us of the " Little Red Box 
of Vesey Street," and its part in the 
human comedy of New York life. The 
scenes of Tlie Midge will be described 
later in this book ; the houses and streets 
of the first part of The Storij of a New 
York Rouse belong to old New York. 
The house in which Jacob Dolph the 
elder lived during the first years of the 
century, and from the pillared balcony 
of which his family and friends looked 
out and down on the glinting waters of 
the bay, is one of the few noble struc- 
tures that are left to us of the older city. 
Bunner's choice is easily understood. 
Even now the Mission of Our Lady of 
the Rosary, a home for Irish immigrant 
girls. No. 7 State Street, despite the in- 
congruity of the neighbouring edifices, 
impresses one as having been in its day 

2 17 



J^EW YORK IN FICTION 

the fitting mansion of a merchant prince 
of old Manhattan. The former grandeur 
of the locality is gone, the air shrill with 
the rush and clatter of the elevated trains, 
the clanging of cable bells, the rattle 
of heavily laden trucks ; the surrounding 
streets are grimy and dirty, but the old 
house attracts and holds attention by its 
sedate dignity. The original builder, or 
the architect who designed it, probably 
changed his plans more than once in the 
course of building. It is supported by 
three tall rude columns of stone and 
stucco. The windows of the second 
story are thrown in shadow by the pe- 
culiar curve of the upper balcony. From 
the State Street sidewalk stone steps lead 
up to the entrance on both sides. Over 
the iron railing is the gilded cross of the 
Mission.^ 

1 In ISOi, wliich, according to Mr. Banner's story, was 
the period of the occupancy of Jacob Uolph, the house was 
really tenanted by William Van Vredenburgh, who had 
served under Washington with the rank of Colonel. The 
Van Vredenburghs emigrated, not to (Jreenwich village, but 

18 




JACOB DOLPH's nODSE, NO. 7 STATE STREET. HUNNEK. 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

A few doors away, at No. 17 State 
Street, was the home of William Irving, 
Washington Irving's elder brother, and 
of J. K. Panlding, — a meeting place for 
the literary wits of the period. William 
Irving was the "Pindar Cockloft" of 
Salmagnndi. Cockloft Hall itself, as De 
Wolfe in his Literary Haunts has pointed 
out, still stands on the banks of the Pas- 
saic. It was only a few hundred yards 
away by the water front of Battery Park 
that, half a century later, the Jacob 
Dolph who in 1807 was a little boy at- 
tending Mrs. Kilmaster's private school 
on Ann Street, fell to the ground with the 
apoplectic stroke that brought about his 
death. Mr. Ho wells writes of the Bat- 
tery in Tlieir Wedding Journey and in A 

to the valley of the Mohawk, embarking for their journey 
in a sloop at the foot of Whitehall Street. Among the 
Onondaga Indians of the Mohawk, the erstwhile continental 
officer was known as " The Great Clear Sky." In a letter 
now before the present w'riter thei"e are the words, " The 
great-granddaughter of the Colonel now sits ojiposite me, 
absorbed in the perusal of A New Yo?-k House." 

21 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Hazard of New Fortunes; and Edmund 
Clarence Stedman is among the poets 
who have found in it poetical inspiration. 

Retracing our steps across the Park, 
we leave State Street, turn into White- 
hall Street, move northward past Bowl- 
ing Green, where, on the site of one of 
the steamship offices that until a year ago 
lined the southern side of the triangle, 
Martin Krieger's tavern stood, and where 
the bruised and mutilated iron palings 
stand mute witnesses of ])atriotic scorn 
for the crest and features of King George. 
One of the scenes of Edgar Fawcett's 
Romance of Old New York — a prize story 
of a few years ago, but a story deserving 
more enduring fame than is accorded 
most prize stories — was laid in Bowling 
Green. 

Jacob Dolph, to revert to Bunner's 
story, had a naive belief in the city's 
future, and builded fine day-dreams of a 
New York that was to reach far beyond 
the City Hall, beyond Richmond Hill, 

22 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

perhaps even as far as the Parade itself. 
He strenuously opposed the plan to have 
the north end of the new City Hall, 
which in 1807 was in the course of erec- 
tion, constructed of cheap red stone, in 
the face of the popular belief that only 
a few suburbans would ever look down 
on it from above Chambers Street. In 
the first decade of the century the phrase 
" from the Battery to Bull's Head " was 
a fine and effective hyperbole. Part of a 
Bull's Head Tavern, though not the first, 
still stands on the northeast corner of 
Third Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. 
When the Commissioners made the afore- 
mentioned map, Wall Street was already 
typical. The Stock Exchange had been 
in existence almost ten years, and the 
street which in the earlier colonial times 
had marked the northern boundary of the 
Dutch New Amsterdam, became almost 
immediately, to a certain extent, the 
pulse of the nation's finance. Since that 
time there has been no thoroughfare so 

23 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

widely used and so roundly abused by 
the makers of New York fiction — scarcely 
one of them but at some time has taken 
his stand on the Broadway sidewalk in 
front of old Trinity and shouted his dis- 
mal denunciation. The heroes and hero- 
ines of American fiction very often 
achieve fabulous wealth through specu- 
lation; apparently worthless securities 
bought for a mere song and laid away in 
deposit vaults, or, better still, in old attic 
trunks or musty cupboards or woollen 
stockings, and forgotten, soar skyward 
on the Pindaric wings of romance; but 
Wall Street in the guise of the Fairy 
Grodmother somehow never gets its due. 
This is the significant distinction, that 
in fiction fortune comes to men and 
women through "lucky speculation," 
ruin through Wall Street. 

Leaving for a minute the men and 
women of Bunner's story, the vicinity 
conjures up the people of Charles Dudley 
Warner's Golden House ; the Brights, 

24 




HOME Ol" THE LAUDERDALES. 
LAUDERDALE ' 



— F. MARION Crawford's "katherinb 

AND " THE RALSTONS." 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Bemans, Lauderdales, Ralstons of Mar- 
ion Crawford's novels of New York life; 
the hero of Thomas Janvier's At the Casa 
Napoleon, who day after day took his 
stand at the southwest corner of Broad 
and Wall streets to study idly the great 
statue of Washington on the stone steps 
of the Sub-Treasury, and build fine day- 
dreams of the three thousand dollar 
clerkship that never seem to come true. 
Joris Van Heemskirk, of whom Mrs. 
Barr tells us in The Bow of Orange Bih- 
hon, was an important figure in the Wall 
Street of 1765. A two-storied house at 
the lower end of Pearl Street was the 
home of Jacob Cohen and his grand- 
daughter Miriam. The Kalchook, or 
Kalch Hoek, where Captain Hyde and 
Neil Semple fought their duel, was a hill 
of considerable elevation, to the west of 
the present line of Broadway. Its south- 
ern boundary was about Warren Street, 
its northern boundary about Canal. The 
district lying at its base was a fever- 

27 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

breeding marsh until drained, by An- 
thony Rutgers. Afterward it was known 
as Lispenard Meadows, from Rutgers' s 
daughter, Mrs. Lispenard. The little 
lake or pond at its foot was called first 
Kalk-Hook, and afterward became known 
as the Collect Pond. The corner of 
Broadway and Franklin Street marks 
what was then the summit of the 
Kalchook Hill. The slope is still per- 
ceptible. In her recently published Tlie 
Maid of Maiden Lauf Mrs. Barr treats 
practically of the same quarters of the 
city. The speculations that swept away 
all that was left of the once great Dolph 
family estate in the panic of 1873 were 
conducted in an office on William Street, 
near where the Cotton Exchange now 
stands. On Front Street was the whole- 
sale grocery firm, "Files and Nelson," 
of which Thomas Bailey Aldrich has 
written in My Consin fhf Colonel. The 
ship-chandlering firm of Abram Van 
Riper and Son, whence Eustace Dolph 

28 



MFW YORK IN FICTION 

fled a forger, and where the delightful 
Mr. Daw, a very Dickensy creation, once 
tried a rolled-top desk and a revolving 
chair to his alarm and discomtiture, was 
on Water Street. Of Mrs. Kilmaster's 
private school on Ann- Street, attended 
by Jacob Dolph the second, or of the 
Van Riper mansion on Pine Street, op- 
posite the great Burril House, of course 
no traces remain. Ray, the hero of Wil- 
liam Dean Howells's World of Chance, 
coming to seek his fortune in New York, 
noted first, from the deck of the North 
River ferryboat, " the mean, ugly fronts 
and roofs of the buildings beyond, and 
hulking high overhead in farther dis- 
tance in vast bulks and clumsy towers 
the masses of those ten-story edifices 
which are the necessity of commerce 
and- the despair of art." 

The men who figure in the first part 
of Tlie Stortj of a Neir York House were 
in the habit of meeting to discuss trade 
and politics in the barber-shop of one 

29 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Huggins. This shop was on the north- 
east corner of Broadway and Wall Street, 
the site now occupied by the United 
Bank Building, a structure which has 
been in existence less than thirty years. 
In one of the old office buildings that 
formerly occupied the same site was 
Ugly Hall, the headquarters of the Ugly 
Club, a literary organization of which 
Halleck was a leading member. The 
entrance to Huggins' s barber-shop was 
al)out on the spot now marked by the 
first Broadway door of the bank building. 
Before the yellow-fever plague of 1822, 
the fashionable residence quarter of the 
city was a])out Bowling Green, Water, 
Pearl, Beaver, Broad, Whitehall streets 
and the lower end of Broadway. Mer- 
chants, shopkeepers, lawyers, as a rule, 
resided over their offices and stores. Mr. 
Charles H. Haswell, in his Boiiinisecnces 
of an Orfof/nHU'ian in fhf Citt) of New 
York, speaks of the " Dutch-designed 
and Dutch-built houses," with sharply 

30 



WEW YORK IN FICTION 

pitched roofs and gable ends to the 
street, that were at that day remaining 
in Broad Street. This street by night 
has been very effectively described by 
Mr. Julius Chambers in On a Margin. 
The plague drove people to the open 
fields that lay between the city proper 
and Greenwich village. One night dur- 
ing this period, when the sky was red 
with the light of the tar barrels that were 
being burned in Ann Street, Mrs. Jacob 
Dolph was buried in the churchyard of 
St. Paul's. In Chambers Street, oppo- 
site the north end of City Hall, was, in 
1820, the office of the Chief of Pohce, 
where Allan Dale (Admiral Porter's Al- 
lan Dale and Eohert le Diahle) made his 
first appearance on the stage of that 
story. Farther up Broadway, in an office 
building near Worth Street, was the one- 
room law office of Peter — afterward 
the Honourable Peter — Stirling. At the 
Duane Street corner, adjoining the 
grounds of the New York Hospital, was 

31 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

the eigar-8tore of John Anderson, which 
Edgar AHan Poe's story of The Mystery 
of Marie Roget assured a permanent place 
among the scenes of New York fiction. 



III. PARK now IN FICTION 

Park Row in fiction has a twofold sig- 
nificance and interest. In the first place, 
the Row and the adjacent streets are 
hallowed by the literary and histrionic 
memories of the past. Here, where the 
new Park Row Syndicate Building 
stands, was the old Park Theatre, the 
scene of the triumphs of Edmund Kean, 
Sinclair, C-ooke, Young, Charles Kemble, 
Tyrone Power, Ellen Tree, Fanny Kem- 
ble, Emma Wheatley, Clara Fisher, Ju- 
nius Brutus Booth, J. W. Wallack, John 
and Charles Mason, Charlotte Cushman. 
These pavements were trod by Irving, 
Poe, Halleck, Cozzens, Du Chaillu, 
''Harry Franco," Brougham, Hoffman, 
Morris ; and Clark passed many a night 

32 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

on the benches in the Park opposite. 
Later, it has belonged to Edmnnd 
Clarence Stedman, George William Cur- 
tis, William Curtis, William Dean How- 
ells, Richard Henry Stoddard and to the 
young and middle-aged poets and novel- 
ists of the present day. In the second 
place, as a background, as a part, a phase, 
of the Human Comedy of New York life, 
it is beginning to have a meaning. True, 
we have had nothing descriptive of the 
life comparable to Balzac's analytic and 
terrible arraignment of Paris journalism 
in Illusions Perdues, or even to the chap- 
ters dealing with the life of Fleet Street 
and the Fleet Prison in Pendennis. The 
stories of Park Row life have not gone 
very far below the surface, but two or 
three young newspaper men and at least 
one newspaper woman have written very 
cleverly and entertainingly of "beats" 
and "sticks" and "copy-readers" and 
'' cub reporters " and " star ' ' men. Then, 
too, there are the " lady novelists," to 

35 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

whom the Row is as useful as it is vague, 
who find it a well of local colour, al- 
though it might not be polite to question 
them too closely as to the whereabouts 
of Ann or Beekman or Spruce or Frank- 
lin streets. The " journalist " — he is 
never a mere newspaper man — of this 
sort of fiction is forever stalking crim- 
inals, scenting out big news, talking in 
rather flabby epigram, or making violent 
love. He is usually dashing off edito- 
rials that make statesmen " sit up," and 
when he writes " stories," they are never 
less than a column in length and are in- 
evitably found tlie next morning under 
big black headlines at the beginning of 
the first page. He lives in Bohemia, a 
neighbourhood of which most city editors, 
who are supposed to know a good deal 
al)out everything pertaining to the city's 
streets and corners, will ]nT)fess entire 
ignorance. In short, the journalist of 
this type is very beautiful and well 
groomed, but it must be confessed he is 

36 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

considerably different from the practical 
newspaper man of real life. And it is 
with the latter that the present writer 
has to do. 




THE CITY editor's DESK. J. L. WILLIAMS'S " THE CITY 

editor's conscienck." 



If, as yon go np the Row, yon will tnrn 
in at the dark doorway of No. 29, and 
mount three pairs of stairs, yon will find 
the long, grimy one-room newspaper office 
which was the scene of Jesse Lynch 

37 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Williams's story of "The City Editor's 
Conscience." In The Bookman for June, 
1899, Maguire, who got the gold watch 
and chain, and of whom Henderson 
said in his speech that he was " about 
the squarest city editor in Park Row, 
even if he did tiare up occasionally and 
get red in the face," was identified as 
"Jerry" Donnelly. It may he of in- 
terest to add that the real name of the 
telegraph editor mentioned in the open- 
ing sentence of the story is Clark ; that 
Brown, who was sent to the telephone to 
take from the Police Headquarters man, 
Wintringer (who in real life is Watson 
Sands), the story of a " bull that has 
broken loose on its way to a slaughtei-- 
liouse uptown, and been terrorising 
people on Fifty-ninth Street, near the 
river," is Albert M. Chapman; that the 
cub reporter Avho was sent out on the ferry 
accident assignment is John E. Weier. 
The appearance of the office is changed 
but very little since the time of the story. 

38 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Farther up the Row, the Sun building, 
at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort 
streets, is the scene of "The Stolen 
Story." Here worked Hamilton Knox, 
the cub reporter who found it easier to 
write his facts and then make them; 
and Rufus Carrington, who beat all the 
older men from the other papers on the 
"Great Secretary of State Interview;" 
and Townsend's Philip Peyton and Ter- 
ence Lynn and T. Fitzgerald Lyon and 
that pathetic figure Tommy Nod; while 
just over the way is the office of the 
Earth, where Billy AVoods was employed 
for a few eventful hours after being dis- 
charged by the Day. In the Park op- 
posite, Colonel Peter Stirling's regiment 
was quartered during the riots described 
in Paul Leicester Ford's book. It was 
there that took place the bomb explosion 
w^hich killed Podds. Over on the Park Row 
sidewalk Peter Stirling was found sleep- 
ing with his head pillowed on a roll of 
newspapers byLeonore andWattsD' Alloi. 

39 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

After laying aside Jesse Lynch Wil- 
liams's stories of newspaper life, one 
very natnrally tnrns to Miss Elizabeth 
Jordan's admirable Tales of the City 
Boom. With one exception all the stories 
which make np Miss Jordan's books had 
the office of the New York World for 
background. The author was with that 
newspaper for ten years, doing editorial 
work in various departments. Many of 
the stories are entirely true. For in- 
stance, one of the strongest of all, " Miss 
Van Dyke's Best Story," which told of a 
shy, demure young newspaper woman 
who, inspired by the sheer horror and nov- 
elty of the thing, wrote a most wonderful 
and unfortunate description of the hideous- 
ness of an election night in the Tender- 
loin district, really happened just as was 
told, with the exception of the love inci- 
dent at the end. The heroine is a young- 
lady now on the staff of the Journal. 
" ' Chesterfield, Junior,' " says Miss Jor- 
dan, " is a live small boy who looked very 

40 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

like the description I gave of him, and 
whose manners were a dehght to the 
entire staff. He is still at work, and is 
now wrestling with an ambition to be a 
managing editor some day." 

A rather striking recent book that is 
closely linked with this part of New York 
is Mr. Irving Bachelor's Ehen Holdcn, 
of which several very graphic chapters 
treat of the old Tribune office in the 
days of Horace Greeley. In finding for 
his hero a home in New York, Mr. 
Bachelor has preserved in fiction one of 
the quaintest of all its quaint corners. 
The Monkey Hill of the period of the 
story was at a point which is now over- 
shadowed by one of the arches of the 
Brooklyn Bridge. It has to-day a prac- 
tical existence, but its identity has long 
been lost. At the time of the outbreak 
of the War of Secession, there were some 
neat and cleanly looking houses on it 
of wood and brick and brownstone, in- 
habited by small tradesmen ; a few shops, 

43 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

a big stable, and the chalet sitting on a 
broad. Hat roof that covered a portion of 
the stable yard. The yard itself was the 
snmniit of Monkey Hill. It lay between 
two brick bnildings and up the hill from 
the walk, one looking into the gloomy 
cavern of the staljle ; and under the low 
roof, on one side, there were dump-carts 
and old coaches in varying stages of in- 
firmity. " There was an old iron shop, 
that stood fiush with the sidewalk, flank- 
ing the stable yard. A lantern and a 
mammoth key were suspended above the 
dooi", and hanging upon the side of the 
shop was a wooden stair ascending to 
the chalet. The latter had a sheathing 
of weather-worn clapboards. It stood on 
the rear end of the brick building, com- 
municating with the front rooms above 
the shop. A little stair of five steps as- 
cended from the landing to its red door 
that overlooked an ample yard of roofing, 
adorned with potted plants. The main 
room of the chalet had the look of a 

44 



NUW YORK IN FICTION 

ship's cabin. There were stationary 
seats along the wall covered with leath- 
ern cushions. There were port and star- 
board lanterns, and a big one of polished 
brass that overhung the table. A ship's 
clock that had a noisy and cheerful tick 
was set in the wall. A narrow passage 
led to the room in front, and the latter 
had slanting sides. A big window of 
little panes, in its further end, let in the 
light of William Street. 

IV. THE POLITICIAN AS LITEIIAIIY MATERIAL 

Very recently a breez}^ Western states- 
man gave out unsolicited the interesting 
information that he had decided to write 
a novel. When asked if he had in mind 
any definite theme, he replied that he 
guessed that the book would treat of 
political life. Thereupon the newspaper 
paragrapher waxed exceedingly merry at 
his expense, and the daily reader snick- 
ered and mentally added the statesman 

45 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

in question to the already long list of 
jokes which arise out of the political 
incongruities of the West, — the Boy 
Orators and the Sockless ones. We wish 
stoutly to maintain our possession of a 
sense of the humorous and our appreci- 
ation of the little ironies of life. We 
acknowledge that we are not building 
any high hopes in regard to this prom- 
ised literary effort, and will cheerfully 
leave to the press of Xenia, Ohio, Joliet, 
Illinois, and Mapleton, North Dakota, 
the task of heralding it as the Great 
American novel; but beyond this we 
must profess ourselves totally unable to 
appreciate the humour which is pro- 
voked by the mere suggestions of politics 
as a theme for literary treatment; also 
the whole incident is so very significant. 
The manner in which the machinery of 
politics has been ignored in the attempts 
of fiction to portray American life as it 
is, is certainly one of the most curious 
anomalies of our national literature. 

46 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

To measure with any degree of accu- 
racy the reasons for this neglect of a 
subject which, above all others, would 
seem to be vitally linked with the very 
fibres of American life, one can get noth- 
ing very convincing from merely looking 
at the conditions which prevail to-day; 
one must go back and look into the liter- 
ary tastes which prevailed during the 
first half of the century and the years 
which immediately preceded and imme- 
diately followed the War of Secession. 
If we except a few of the great names — 
Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, Cooper, and 
their peers — one may say without being 
in the least unpatriotic that the general 
tendency of our literature was to be de- 
cried rather than applauded. The school 
of which N. P. Willis in his day was so 
striking a type was one which threat- 
ened seriously to retard the scheme of 
evolution which one may say now with 
considerable confidence will ultimately 
give us a great national literature. The 

47 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

liction which was so popular a quarter 
of a century ago was utterly bad in that 
it preached false ideals and a certain 
false gentility. It was written in re- 
sponse to a demand ; on the other hand, 
it did a great deal toward fostering this 
demand and fettering alike the writer 
and the reader. 

Probably there is no book which better 
represents this type than Mrs. Augusta J. 
Evans Wilson's St. Ehno. Its hero was 
certainly the prize stock hero of his time, 
the real and indisputable ancestor of the 
Richard Harding Davis hero when that 
writer is at his worst. Taken apart, 8t. 
Elmo Murray was rather a flabby sort of 
poor creature, but when standing in full 
make-up under the glare of the lime-light, 
he was a positive triumph of sardonic 
msoiiciancr. What dreadful oaths he 
swore and how amazingly genteelly 
he swore them! What a tremendous 
amount of rag-bag information the fel- 
low had at his fingers' ends ! The most 

48 



NEW YOUK IN FICTION 

eoninioiiplace remark apropos of the 
most trivial incident of every-clay life, 
and, presto, lie was off, scampering 
through Egyptian mythology, playing 
ducks and drakes with the legends of 
the Scandinavian Eddas, bawling his 
Promethean "Ai!" over very un-Pro- 
methean woes. It is doul^tful whether 
there was very much harm in the accept- 
ance by the millions of readers of the 
high-school type of this twaddle as real 
scholarship. Very likely there were 
some who were in a measure l)enefited 
and refined by reading all this ill-digested 
information. Only, the whole thing 
served to obscure for a time from Ameri- 
can writers and the American reading 
public the real field of literary labour. 

To point out how distinctively char- 
acteristic of American literature alone 
is the neglect of the politician as literary 
material, it is not necessary pedantically 
to go back to the comedies of Aris- 
tophanes ; one need only look to French 

4 49 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

and English fiction in the present cen- 
tury. Take the names which come most 
readily to the mind — Dickens and 
Thackeray and Bulwer Lytton and 
Balzac and Victor Hugo. Eliminate 
from the Corned le Humalne the politi- 
cian and the business and chicanery of 
politics, and how inadequate and incom- 
plete the whole structure would seem ! 
Take from Little Dorrit the Tite-Bar- 
nacles, or from Oliver Twist Police Justice 
Fang, or from Tlie Piekirirk Papers the 
election scenes, and Dickens would not 
be what he is. What lover of Thackeray 
would be content to give u}) the contest 
between Sir Barnes Newcome and his 
uncle, and the figure of the sturdy old 
colonel brandishing his stick and crying 
for " fair play ' ' before the hostelry of 
the King's Arms I 

A book was recently published which 
bears forcibly on the subject of the pres- 
ent article. It is called Tliirtij Years in 
New York Politics, and was written by 

50 



HUW YORK IN FICTION 

Matthew P. Breen, a former member of 
the legislature. It is from a literary 
standpoint in many respects disappoint- 
ing. The reader will find in it neither 
style nor form. It cannot boast even 
good type or good paper or good binding ; 
and yet it is a book which if once taken 
up by the New Yorker who has any inter- 
est in his city and its complex history 
should be read from cover to cover. 
That the author realised to the slightest 
degree the remarkable dramatic material 
contained in these pages is very much to 
be doubted. And yet this story of the 
men and events connected with the polit- 
ical administration of New York City 
since the close of the War of Secession 
contains dramatic elements for a series 
of novels whicli, one may say without 
the slightest exaggeration, might be 
made to surpass anything whicli Balzac 
gave us in his Sccnfx fro)n Political Life. 
Where is the romancer who would dare 
to build out of sheer imagination any- 

51 



WFW YORK IN FICTION 

thing to compare with the tremendous 
complications of the Tweed ring, the 
trials of the arch boss and his escape, 
his concealment in the woods near Wee- 
hawken, his flight to Spain, and his final 
capture. Take as the basis for fiction a 
few of the characters which figure in 
these pages, — John Morrissey, Harry 
Genet, Oakey Hall, Peter B. Sweeny, 
" Slippery Dick " Connolly, the Judges 
Barnard and Cardozo. What romance 
of human invention could be more com- 
plete than that of which the greater part 
was played out in the house in West 
Twenty-third Street, where Josephine 
Mansfield received Fisk and Stokes'? 
And yet of the books which have in re- 
cent years enjoyed wide popularity, we 
can recall but one, Mr. Ford's The 
Hoiiourdhle Peter Stirling, which has 
made use of this side of American life. 
By virtue of this alone, TJie IlononrahJe 
Peter Stirling, which, judged purely as a 
literary production, is mediocre, which is 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

very long-winded, which is in parts 
rather vapid and meaningless, rises to 
the dignity of being almost a great novel. 
It is related of ex-Mayor Gilroy that 
he read Peter Stirling during an ocean 
voyage from England to this country, 
and that after his arrival, when seated 
among his friends one evening, he took 
up the hook and pointed with his finger 
to the different parts which treated of 
politics, emphasising the gesture with 
the forcible and eloquent words, " Is n't 
it all damn so? " Than this Mr. Ford 
could ask no higher praise. Another 
very typical case is that of a former New 
Jersey county clerk, who confesses that 
during the last three or four years he has 
been reading Tlie Honourahte Peter Stir- 
t'n}(j through on an average of once every 
three months. He has been a lifelong 
politician. The primary is his workshop. 
The devices, the trickeries, the strata- 
gems of politics, are to him the tarts of 
the pastry-cook, only in this case they 

53 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

have in no wise lost their crispness and 
flavour. He is not a bookish man, and 
lighter fiction does not appeal to him. 
A man on the highroad to fifty cannot 
forever be snivelling over the woes of 
Rudolph and the lamentations of Re- 
gina ; he is one of a class seriously to be 
reckoned with; and to one who has a 
sturdy belief iu the future of American 
literature his simple l:)ut eloquent prefer- 
ence for a book which commands atten- 
tion only as striking into a very vital 
phase of life which has hitherto ])een 
deemed beneath literary treatment is 
infinitely more significant than the ap- 
plause of high-school sentimentalists or 
the cackling of the "Culture Clubs." 

At the angle made by the running to- 
gether of Worth and Park Streets is, as 
any one with the slightest pretension to 
an acquaintance with New York knows, 
the little triangular park that marks the 
site of wdiat was once the Five Points. 
It was there, about 187-1, that Peter Stir- 

r)4 




"a little i'auk, too small to I!K called a square, even if 

ITS SHAI-E had not r.EEN A TIM ANCLE." — IOUD's " THE HON- 
OUKAliLE PETER STIRLING." 



J^UW YORK IN FICTION 

ling made friends with the tenement- 
house children and took the first step 
toward the achievement of his career*. 
The park lies directly to the east of the 
Broadway building in which he had his 
office. " It had no right to be there, for 
the land was wanted for business pur- 
poses, ])ut the hollow on which it was 
built had been a swamp in the old days, 
and the soft land, and perhaps the un- 
healthiness, had prevented the erection 
of great warehouses and stores, which 
almost surrounded it. So it had been 
left to the storage of human souls, in- 
stead of merchandise, for valuable goods 
need careful housing, while any place 
serves to pack humanity." While there 
remains much to remind us of the con- 
ditions of twenty-five years ago, the com- 
paratively recent construction of the 
greater park, only a stone's throw dis- 
tant, has done a great deal toward the 
reclamation of the quarter. A few 
hundred yards to the west of this little 

57 



^^EW YORK IN FICTION 

park we find on Centre Street the saloon 
of Dennis Moriarty, Peter's staunch 
friend and poHtical henchman. 




SALOON OF DENNIS MORIARTY. 



When Edward W. Townsend was a 
reporter on the New York Sun^ he was 
one day sent out on a " story " which 
took him to the offices of a fossilised 
company with a nine-worded name. 

58 



NUW YORK IN FICTION 

Two or three antiquated clerks sat about 
on high stools, poring over musty ledgers, 




THE NIANTIC, EXCHANGE PLACE. TOWNSEND S 

" A DAUGHTER OF THE TENEMENTS." 



and the business atmosphere was that of 

the sixth rather than the last decade of 

59 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

the century. These offices were in No. 
51 Exchange Place, between Broad and 
William streets, and that structure plays 
a conspicuous part in ^i Daugliter of the 
Tenements under the name of the Niantic. 
It was there that Dan Lyon, the " Lord 
of Mulberry Court," was janitor, that 
Mark Waters schemed, and that the 
Chinaman Chung stole the papers that 
he afterward concealed in the sole of his 
shoe. No. 51 is on the nortli side of the 
street, next to the Mills Building. It is 
five stories in height ; it has an elevator 
— a startling concession to modernit}^ in 
the buildings that line Exchange Place. 
At every story iron balconies jut out over 
the sidewalk and grooved gray columns 
run up along the front of the main office. 
There is a barber shop in the basement. 
In the book the Niantic was characterised 
as " one of the old-fashioned five-story 
granite office buildings, where com- 
mercial aristocracy transacts its business 
affairs in the same manner as when the 

GO 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

tenants of the building lived on Park 
Place or Barclay Street or thereabouts, 
and took drives to the homes of that 
venturesome colony of other aristocrats 
who had located out of the country as 
far uptown as Washington Square." 



V. THE EAST SrDE — CASE'S AND THE BIG BAR- 
RACKS TENEMENTS — " C AT ALLEY " — THE 
GHETTO — MULBERRY BEND AND CHINA- 
TOWN 

On the south side of Hester Street, about 
fifty yards west of the Bowery, is Case's 
Tenement, where the disreputable Mr. 
Raegan lay in hiding after his fatal fight 
with Pike McGronegal at the end of 
Wakeman's Dock on the East River 
front, and which is spoken of in many of 
Richard Harding Davis's earlier stories. 
It is a very dirty and dilapidated struc- 
ture, — broken panes of glass, twisted rail- 
ings, glaring discolourations. There is a 
Chinese laundry on the main fioor. Nine 

61 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

or ten years ago Mr. Davis, who was then 
a reporter on the Evening Sun, was one 




CASES TENKiMENT, HESTER STREET. — RICHARD HARDING 
DAVIS. 

62 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

day sent up to this place to " cover" the 
story of a greengoods game that was sup- 
posed to be running there under the 
supervision of a man named Perceval. 
Mr. Perceval was found, but refused to 
believe in the sincerity of his visitor as a 
" come-on," and the interview ended by 
Mr. Davis beating a very hasty and un- 
dignified retreat. Later, the author of 
Van Bibber met the messenger boy, who 
acted as trailer for the greengoods man, 
and offered him ten dollars for infor- 
mation as to the exact nature of his 
employer's business, the boy proving in- 
corruptible. The incident was elaborated 
in the story of " The Trailer of Room 
No. 8." 

The Big Barracks Tenement, the scene 
of the majority of the stories in Julian 
Ralph's People We Pass, is a great yellow 
brick structure on the west side of For- 
sythe Street, near the northern end. 
The Big Barracks was the home of Dr. 
Whitfield and his daughter, Mrs. Eric- 

63 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

8011, " Petey " and Nora Burke, and the 
scene of " The Lineman's Weddmg," ar- 
ranged and reported by Mr. "Barny" 
Kelley of the DaUij Camera. Alhision is 
also due to the stories of ' ' Love in the 
Big Barracks," probably the truest and 
strongest tale of all in People We Pass, 
and " The Mother Song," with its touch- 
ing pathos and quaint humour. Speak- 
ing of these stories, Mr. Ralph, in a 
recent letter to the present writer, says : 
" In truth, like so many other things of 
the kind, my stories grew out of many 
pieces. First I adopted the name of the 
house because of the brutal and insulting 
name, ' The Big Flat,' I saw on a double- 
decker tenement in lower Mott or Baxter 
Street. Next I described the house with 
which I was familiar — or a type of tene- 
ment found elsewhere. Finally I chose 
Forsythe Street, because I knew more 
tenement folks there than elsewhere, 
knew them better, and thought that the 
mixture of races and worldly conditions 

64 




"big barracks " TKNEMENT, FORSYTHE STREET. — JULTAN KALPIl's 
" I'EOI'LE WE PASS." 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

offered as mucli scope for stories as I 
could get from any other quarter. In- 
numerable as were the kinds and points 
at which I touched these tenement people 
in my reporting experience, it was only 
here that I was received in their clubs or 
societies, at their dances and on their 
picnics, on a basis of complete friendli- 
ness and frankness. In other words, / 
looked on in other tenement districts, but 
in this one / took part. And here I found 
at least one lay employer of skilled labour 
living in old-world fraternity with his 
employes and their families, as well as an 
unusual numl^er of well-to-do and more 
than ordinarily respectable tavern and 
shop keepers. It's all a thing of the 
past. A very few years ago I went back 
and tried to resurrect the old conditions, 
but they were buried and their spirit had 
moved uptown." 

The streets in this vicinity are also the 
streets of Abraham Cahan's stories of 
Grhetto life, which will be treated more 

67 



2^UW YORK IN FICTION 

closely hereafter. In Ludlow Street was 
the home of Lena (Edward W. Town- 
send's " By Whom the Offence Cometh "), 
before she went to live with Bat the 
pickpocket. One of the dim alleys that 
lead back from Rivington Street was 
used by Charles Dudley Warner in Tlie 
Golden House; it was also in Rivington 
Street that Van Bibber thrashed the 
toughs with a scientific vehemence which 
showed that he might have risen to high 
distinction in the welter or light-weight 
division. Meeting on the northwest cor- 
ner of Rivington Street and the Bowery, 
John Suydam and the novelist De Ruyter 
start out together in " The Search for 
Local Colour" (Brander Matthews); 
near by Chimmie Fadden made an effec- 
tive political speech from the tail end of 
a cart, and the atmosphere and life of 
this quarter of the city were admirably 
portrayed in a short fugitive sketch called 
" Extermination," by J. L. Steffens, pub- 
lished in a New York newspaper about 

68 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

two years ago.^ The scene of " Extermi- 
nation ' ' was Cat Alley, opposite the 
Police Headquarters in Mulberry Street. 
" Looney Lenny " was " Silly Willie," or 
"Willie" Gallegher, a messenger for 
the headquarters newspaper men. " C'at 
Alley," which no longer exists, was 
admirably described by Jacob A. Riis in 
an article on " The Passing of Cat Alley," 
printed in the Centnry about a year ago. 
Brander Matthews has written of the 
old wooden houses of this neighbourhood 
" as pathetic survivals of the time when 
New York still remembered that it had 
been New Amsterdam." Here he found 
the streak of local colour that went to 
make "Before the Break of Day." 
While the telephone number was given, 
the saloon of the story was purely imagi- 
nary. The episode on which the tale 
was based actually took place in a house 
in Denver. 

Going back to the Ghetto, Abraham 

1 The Commercial Adi-ertlser, July 24, 1897. 
69 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Calian's " Yekl," whom Zangwill recog- 
nised as the only Jew m American fic- 
tion, worked in a sweatshop in Pitt 
Street. Mr. Cahan said recently in con- 
versation that New York contained fonr 
different Grhettos. The great Ghetto is 
l)ounded by the East River, by Cherry 
Street, by the Bowery, and on the north 
formerly by Honston Street, but now it 
has crept up as far as East Tenth Street. 
This is the largest Ghetto in the world, 
greater even than the Warsaw Ghetto. 
Hester Street, the heart of this Ghetto, is 
known throughout Europe. Of the other 
three Ghettos, one lies between Ninety- 
eighth and One Hundred and Sixteenth 
Streets, east of Central Park; another, 
the Brownsville Ghetto, is in the Twenty- 
sixth Ward, Brooklyn; the last is the 
Williamsburg Ghetto. In writing " Tlie 
Imported Bridegroom," a story which 
dealt with the New York of twenty 
years ago, Mr. Cahan had in view the old 

Ghetto about Bayard and Catherine 

70 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

streets, which in the years followinf-- the 
close of the Civil War was settled by a 




THE GKEAT SYNAGOGUE OF THE GHETTO, NORFOLK STKEET. 

CAHAn's "the IMPORTED BKIUEGKOOM." 

73 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

prosperous class of Russian Jews. At 
the time of the writing of the story con- 
siderable of this quarter remained. It 
is now almost entirely extinct. The 
school in Christie Street attended by 
Flora Stroon was only recently torn 
down. On the east side of the Bowery, 
a little below Canal Street, was the 
restaurant in which Shaya was found l>y 
Azrael Stroon. On Norfolk Street, near 
Broome, is the great synagogue " Beth- 
Hamidrash Hagodal " (the great house 
of study"). It was there in the vestry 
room that Shaya Golub studied the Tal- 
mud. On the third floor of a rickety 
old tenement in Essex Street was the 
sweatshop of the Lipmans, described in 
"A Sweatshop Romance." Boris and 
Tatyana Lurie of " Circumstances " lived 
in Madison Street, and it was to rooms 
on the second floor of a Cherry Street 
tenement-house that Nathan and Goldy 
repaired after " A Grhetto Wedding." 
In Henry Street was the first New 

74 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

York home of the Everetts (Edgar Faw- 
cett's ^i New York Famihj) after their 




STLDY ROOMS, THE CHEAT SYNAGO(;OE, NoKIDLlv S IKIOET. 
CAHAn's "the IJIPORTED BlilDEGROOM." 



migration from Hoboken. The Everett 
children attended school in Scannel 
Street. That was in the early half of the 



75 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

century, when Broome, Prince, and Bond 
streets were fashionable thoroughfares, 
and the best shops were on Grand Street 
and the Bowery. With the passing of 
the Bend disappeared Mulberry Court, the 
strange, grim, and picturesque bit of 
proletarian New York that Edward W. 
Townsend has described in A DdKghtey of 
the Tenements. The entrance to the nar- 
row alley that led to the court was on the 
west side of Mulberry Street, about fifty 
paces below Bayard Street, and directly 
opposite the Italian banks and the Italian 
library. The site of Mulljerry Court is 
marked by a tree that, surrounded by a 
circle of turf, stands in the northeast 
corner of the new park. On the east 
side of Baxter Street, south of Bayard, 
a tunnel leads back to the rear tenement 
where Carminella and Miss Eleanor 
Hazlehurst of North Washington Square 
visited the child stricken with fever. 
The tunnel was next door to a saloon. 
All this, of course, was swept away when 

76 




a a 



JVFW YORK IN FICTION 

the block was converted into a park. 
Mr. Townsend, as became the historian 
of this quarter, has spoken of the colour 
and brightness of Mulberry Street, which 
is fairly alive with the scarlet and orange 
and green and bronze of the shops and 
push-carts. In direct contrast is the 
hideous blackness of Baxter Street, with 
its ghastly and inhuman stretches of 
second-hand clothes. Moving up the 
steep incline that begins at Mulberry and 
Park streets, we find at the corner of 
Mott Street the little Roman Catholic 
Church of the Transfiguration, where 
the white slaves of Chinatown died 
in Townsend's story of " The House 
of Yellow Brick." The House of Yellow 
Brick stands on the north side of Pell 
Street, about thirty yards from the 
Bowery. Only a few doors away a saloon 
at the corner of Doyer and Pell streets 
marks the site of the Old Tree House in 
which Mrs. Susanna Rowson's " Charlotte 
Temple ' ' died about 1776. The original of 

79 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

" Charlotte Temple " was Charlotte Stan- 
ley, the mistress of Lieutenant-Colonel 




■THE HOUSK OF YELLOW BRICK, PELL STREET. 
E. W. TOWNSEND. 

80 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

John Montvesor, the Moiitraville of the 
novel. She is Inn'ied in Trmity chnreh- 
yard. At No. 16 Mott Street, a qnaint and 
striking brick building only a few doors 
from Chatham Square, was the opium den 
kept by the Chinaman Chung, who, as told 
in Mr. Townsend's A IJauf/Jifcr of the 
Tenements, stole the j^^^P^i''^ from Mark 
Waters's office in the Niantic l)uilding on 
Exchange Place. The Chinese fish, tlesh, 
and fowl shop described in the book has 
disappeared, but the restaurant on the 
second floor and the Joss Temple, with 
windows opening on the iron balcony, 
remain. A flight of well-worn stone 
steps run up from the sidewalk in front. 
Since the structure was made use of in 
Townsend's novel, another story has been 
added. This building is known as the 
City Hall of Chinatown. A little farther 
up Mott Street is the Chinese restaurant 
to which Lena (" By Whom the Offence 
Cometh' ' ) went, after Bat had been con- 
victed and sentenced for picking pockets 
6 81 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

on Fifth Avenue. Near Mott Street 
lived Berthold Lindau, the fanatical social- 
ist of Mr. Howells in A Haztwd of New 




"a narrow, worn pair of stone steps running up along- 
side AN old three-story BRICK BUILDING." — TOWNSEND'S 

"a daughter of the tenements." 



ForftfHfs. It was a mere chance that 
caused Mr. Howells to choose this part of 
the city for Lindau's home. The in- 
terior of the dwelling in the story was 

82 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

drawn from the interior of the home of a 
Sociahst who lived in East Fourth Street 
and whom the author visited many years 
ago. A few blocks away, on the Bowery 
above Bayard Street, is the Atlantic Gar- 
den, thinly disguised under the name of 
the Arctic Grarden, where '' Tom " Lyon 
and Carminella and her mother would 
come after the young heroine's dance was 
over for a real supper of beer and sand- 
wiches, and Philip Peyton would " send 
drinks to the performers and hear the 
fact alluded to in the next song." The 
" Tivoli " Theatre, where Carminella 
made her first appearance and scored her 
early successes, has of recent years been 
given over to Yiddish melodrama. Re- 
turning to Baxter Street, a dark passage 
running back from the dirty green door of 
No. 14 leads to what remains of Murderer's 
Alley, one of the most tragic and gruesome 
corners of the old Five Points region. 
Murderer's Alley was used and elaborately 
staged by the late Augustin Daly in his 

83 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

play called Pique. The heroine, who was 
enacted by Fanny Davenport, was mur- 
dered there. The Brace Memorial News- 




NEWSBOYS LOUCING HOUSE, WHERE TOWN.SENJD FuL'NU 
"CIimiMIE lADDEN." 

l)oys' Lodging House, where the idea of 
" Chimmie Fadden " first came to Mr. 
Townsend, is on New Cham])ers Street, 

84 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

a block east of Park Row. Over on 
Cherry Hill were born Hefty Burke and 
the disreputable Mr. Raegan, tw^o of 
Richard Harding Davis's earlier creations. 
East Broadway was the scene of the work 
of Conrad Dryfoos and of Margaret 
Vance described in Mr. Howells's Hazard 
of New Fortune fi. In a sailor's pawnshop 
at the lower end of Catherine Street was 
laid one of the scenes of TJie SJiadotrs of a 
Great City, a very popular melodrama of 
some ten years ago. 

Robert Barr, in an article published 
about two years ago, suggested Stephen 
Crane as the man most likely to write 
the great American novel. Somehow 
the idea was not easily dismissed. As a 
story of New York life — his Maggie, a 
Girl of the Streets — even in the form in 
which it was publicly printed, was in a 
way a dominant book. Few w^riters have 
felt so intensely the throbbing life of the 
city. Stephen Crane saw in the flicker- 
ing street lights, the wet pavements, the 

85 



JVFW YORK IN FICTION 



looming factories and warehouses, count- 
less untold tragedies. Balzac somewhere 
said that the brief newspaper paragraph, 
"Yesterday at four o'clock in the after- 
noon a young person jumped from the 
Pont Neuf into the Seine," contained all 
the elements of the greatest novel. In 
Mr. Crane we found something of this 
passionate intensity. When Maggie ap- 
peared, many cried out against it on the 
ground that it contained no light, no 
hope. But Mr. Crane saw no hope, no 
light. Maggie^ above all his other books, 
is striking in its sincerity. He could not 
see in the lives of the people of Devil's 
Row and Rum Alley sunshine and sen- 
timent and humour, — these people to 
whom joy comes only in debauch. His 
proletaire is very convincing and power- 
ful, rising transcendent over his eccen- 
tricities of style and diction. But the lo- 
calities of the story are merely symbolic. 
Rum Alley and Devil's Row, we learn 
with regret, had no real foundation in fact. 



part CtDO 

ABOUT WASHINGTON SQUARE 




I. THE HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE FUTURE 

YEARS ago, ill the days when — old 
New Yorkers tell us — the skies 
seemed to smile more brightly 
than they do now, when Lower Broad- 
way was still a fashionable promenade, 
when the native Grreenwich villager 
clung proudly and somewhat arrogantly 
to his birthright, and frivolous-minded 
young bucks gathered nightly in the 
Apollo rooms on Broadway near Canal 
Street, — over in Paris fat epiciers and 
their fat wives were blubbering nightly 
over a melodrama then popular at the 
playhouses of Belleville and the outer 
boulevards under the name of Tlie Streets 
of Paris. It was a play combining all 
the conventional elements of sensation, — 
battle, murder and sudden death, arson 

89 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

and charcoal fumes, and of course the 
ultimate triumph of virtue. Just before 
the fall of the curtain it was customary 
for the principal mummer to step for- 
ward to the edge of the footlights and in 
a few words point out that it was the 
theatre's mission to portray make-believe 
woes and passion — for the real tragedy 
of the streets of Paris, the audience must 
look outside, in the narrow alleys of 
Montmartre or about the ahhafoir,s of La 
Villette. After yielding substantial rev- 
enues to French managers, the play in 
the course of years crossed the Channel. 
It made its bow to the audiences of the 
Adelphi Theatre and straightway became 
The Streets of London. Again a few 
years passed and it was being played in 
a New Yoi'k theatre, far uptown on the 
East Side, — the old Mount Morris, we 
think, joy of the benighted Harlemite of 
fifteen or twenty years ago, — as TJie 
Streets of New Yorl\ It was always and 
ever the same old play, only Martyrs' 

90 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Hill (Montmartre) became in turn Saf- 
fron Hill and Cherry Hill. It is many 
years now since The Streets of New Yorl- 
thrilled Manhattan audiences, but — 
Well, the moral is quite obvious. 

Our age and manner of life are, in a 
certain way, dull and disappointing. 
They lack the element of intrigue. We 
look al)out us from day to day, from 
month to month ; we see all the factors 
of history, — battles by land and sea, 
treaties made and treaties violated, riots, 
massacres, annexations, usurpations, and 
the rest; we take a certain hard-headed 
pride in the practical activity of our time, 
but we feel that all is apparent, pain- 
fully apparent, traceable to well-known 
and established laws and causes. The 
romance, the colour, the mystery are not 
for us, but for the readers of the histori- 
cal novel that is to be written two or 
three hundred years hence. It is not 
very difficult to imagine what these 
novels will be like. One can very readily 

91 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

think of the reader laying the delightful 
volume aside to curse the monotony and 
limitations of his own prosaic time, and 
to muse wistfully on those closing years 
of the nineteenth century when a man of 
spirit could carve out for himself fine 
adventures, and by his courage, dash, dex- 
terity, and genius for intrigue do some- 
thing toward moulding the history of the 
age in which he lived. There is not the 
slightest doubt that people who lived in 
Coeur de Lion's time or Quentin Dur- 
ward's time or D'Artagnan's time con- 
sidered their environments on the whole 
rather monotonous and lacking in ro- 
mance. The novels of the twenty-second 
century that deal with the age in which 
we are living will teem with cunningly 
laid snares, dark intrigues, sanguinary 
encounters. Swash-buckling heroes will 
stalk Broadway or the Bowery or Fifth 
Avenue by night, in search of strange 
adventures, and, of course, find them. 
Then history will stand forth raw, bare, 

92 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

naked yet picturesque, — shorn of all its 
polite i^hrases and diplomatic attitudes. 
To give an instance, we in our blindness 
ridiculously believed the amicable settle- 
ment of the Fashoda incident, let us say, 
due to the good sense and skill of Loi'd 
Salisbury and M. Dupuy (Ha! Ha!), 
just as the benighted Britons of 1660 or 
thereabouts believed the return of C-harles 
the Second very commonplace and matter- 
of-fact. Tlifij knew nothing of the night 
on the Newcastle marshes, and the French 
fishermen driven to the shore by storms, 
and the enterprise launched in the Rue 
des Lombards by Planchet et Cie. Nor 
do we see the real figure, the real hero, 
who, as the historical novel of the future 
will tell, at the time when the crisis was 
most acute, crossed to Paris on a Cook's 
ticket, shut the French Premier up in a 
folding bed, shipped bed, mattress. Minis- 
ter, and all to a Manchester furnishing- 
house and — But this of course will be 
the version of the English romance ; the 

93 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

French story will be quite different. It 
will be a French guet a pens^ and the 
victim will in this case be " Le Lord 
Maire Comtede Sale Berri." Why should 
the romancer, wishing to tell of l^rave 
deeds, of sword strokes and pistol play, 
and to find for them a setting in our own 
age, be forced to invent imaginary king- 
doms, principalities, and republics'? Be- 
lieving as we do in our Ivanhoes and 
Durwards and D'Artagnans, we can ill 
afford to discredit the historical romance 
of the future. We feel the existence of 
these heroes; let them stand forth that 
we may do them honour. 

II. WASHINGTON SQUARE 

Henry James, in his novel Washington 
Squ((i-f, speaks of the locality having "a 
kind of established repose which is not 
of frequent occurrence in other quarters 
of the long, shrill city; it has a richer, 
riper look than any of the upper ramifica- 
* 94 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

tions of the great longitudinal thorough- 
fare — the look of having had something 
of a social history." Probably in the 
last words we have the key to the hold 
which the Square has had on almost every 
novelist who has written of New York 
life. An imaginai'y circle, with its centre 
in the white Memorial Arch and a radius 
of five or six hundred yards, would hold 
fully one-half of what is best in the local 
colour of New York fiction. In the two 
short blocks from Macdougal Street to 
Washington Square East, along the north 
side of the quadrangle, are many of the 
structures that have served in the fiction 
of Brander Matthews, Henry James, F. 
Hopkinson Smith, Edward W. Town- 
send, and Julian Ralph. On the south 
side lived Captain Peters and Philip 
Morrow. Only a few blocks away are 
the Casa Napoleon of Janvier, the struc- 
ture in which Colonel Carter lived; the 
Garibaldi of James L. Ford ; the office of 
Every Other Week exploited in ^1 Huzard 

95 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

of New Fortunes; the house where Van 
Bibber found his burglar; the home of 
the Lauderdales — the Hst is a very long 




THE SLOPER RESIDENCE. — HE\RV JAMES's "WASHINGTON 
SQUARE." 

one. And it is curious to note that 

novelists, who elsewhere are at best 

superficial, here become sincere and con- 

96 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

vincing. Dr. Sloper's house, described in 
Henry James's Washington Square, is on 
the north side of the Square, between 
Fifth Avenue and Macdougal Street. In 
1835, when Dr. Sloper first took posses- 
sion, moving uptown from the neighbour- 
hood of the City Hall, which had seen its 
best days socially, the Square, then the 
ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, was 
enclosed by a wooden paling. The struc- 
ture in which the Slopers lived, and its 
neighbours were then supposed to em- 
body the last results of architectural 
science. It was then and is to-day a 
modern house, wide-fronted with a bal- 
cony before the drawing-room windows, 
and a flight of white marble steps ascend- 
ing to a portal also faced with white 
marble. In the twenties Mrs. Sloper was 
" one of the pretty girls of the small but 
promising capital which clustered about 
the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and 
of which the uppermost boundary was 
indicated by the grassy waysides of Canal 
7 97 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Street." A few doors away was the 
home of Mrs. Martin, known as "the 
Duchess of Washington Square," which 
Brander Matthews assured us, in The 
Last Mcpfinij, ''has now regained the 
fashion it had lost for a score of years." 
Greorge William Curtis babbled charm- 
ingly of the old Square in Prue (ind I 

Mr. Howells, in ^i Hazard of New For- 
tunes, writes of the " old-fashioned Amer- 
ican respectability which keeps the north 
side of the Square in vast mansions of 
red brick, and the international shabbi- 
ness which has invaded the southern 
border and broken it up into lodging- 
houses, shops, beer gardens, and studios." 
Basil and Isabel March came here when 
worn out by futile fiat-hunting, and 
"strolled over the asphalt walks under 
the thinning shadows of the autumn- 
stricken sycamores." In one of the brick 
houses with white trimmings on Waverley 
Place, to the east of the Arch, lived Miss 
Grandish (in Julian Ralph's People We 

98 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Pass). Petey Burke, from the sidewalk 
opposite, watched the comings and goings 
of Jenson, the husband of Agnes Whit- 
field, the angel of the Big Barracks tene- 
ment on Forsythe Street. The striking 
social contrast presented by the north 
and south sides of the Square was admi- 
rably caught by Mr. Townsend in " Just 
across the Square." F. Hopkinson Smith 
brings in the Square in CdJcb West^ San- 
ford living in a five-room apartment at 
the top of a house with dormer windows 
on the north side. His guests looking 
out could see the " night life of the Park, 
miniature figures strolling al)out under 
the trees, flashing in brilliant light or 
swallowed up in dense shadow^ as they 
passed in the glare of the many lamps 
scattered among the budding foliage." 
Another of these houses was tenanted by 
Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar Fawcett's Bnflirr- 
ford; and the Square was the scene of 
Mrs. Burton Harrison's Siceet Belh out 
of TiOH'. Near the southeast corner of 
L.ofC. 99 



NUW YORK IN FICTION 

the Square is the Benedick, a red-brick 
bachelor apartment building, used under 
the name of the Monastery by Robert W. 
Chambers in Outsiders, his recent story 
of New York life. 

Under its own name the Benedick 
plays a conspicuous part in the same 
writer's really fine and tragic story, " The 
Repairer of Reputations," and in " The 
Yellow Sign" of The King in Yellow. 

An intimate friend of the late author- 
editor told the present writer that The 
Midge " was written by Bunner to get 
married on." The book was dashed off 
in the house on Seventh Street in which 
he was then living. It was one of the 
rare occasions on which Bunner was ever 
seen to work. This characteristic was 
always a mystery to his friends and busi- 
ness associates. He was seldom seen at 
his writing-table, and j^i at the end of 
the year showed an extraordinary amount 
of work to his credit. The secret lay in 
the ease and speed with which he wrote. 

100 




the jionasteuv, washingl'on squ.vrk. roisert chamhehs: 
"outsiders" and "the king in yellow." 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

There has probably never been a novel 
written that is so drenched with the 
spirit of Washington Square as Tlie 
Midge. Buniier lived there in his younger 
Bohemian days, and throughout his life 
he seemed always to think of it with 
a great love and sympathy. To other 
writers the Square was something to be 
studied in its architectural aspects or as 
a problem in social contrasts. Bunner 
liked it best at night, with the great dim 
branches swaying and breaking in the 
breeze, the gas lamps flickering and 
blinking, when the tumults and the shout- 
ings of the day were gone and " only a 
tramp or something worse in woman's 
shape was hurrying across the bleak 
space, along the winding asphalt, walk- 
ing over the Potter's Field of the past on 
the way to the Potter's Field to be." 
Captain Peters, or Dr. Peters as he pre- 
ferred to be called, lived on the top floor 
of No. 50, a three-story brick structure on 
the " dark south side," between Thomp- 
103 



J^FW YORK IN FICTION 

son and Sullivan streets. The house, 
adjoining the Judson Memorial, stands 
back from the street, and is even darker 




captain peters s home, washington square. — 
bunner's "the midge." 

and gloomier than those about it. A low 
iron railing, once green, separates the 
sidewalk from the poor little plot of sod 
and stunted grass. The door, a single 
step above the ground, is flanked by thin 

104 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

grooved coliiiniis. From the second- 
story windows jut out little balconies. 
It was through the dormer windows jut- 
ting from the roof that Peters looked out 
upon the Square. In the story allusion 
is made to two vacant lots in the rear, 
stretching through to West Third Street. 
" These yards in summer were green and 
bright, and in the centre of one there 
was a tree." Years ago buildings were 
erected on this site, but even to-day, or 
at least until very recently, taking one's 
stand on the east sidewalk of Thompson 
Street and looking over the wooden fence 
in the rear of the Memorial Building, the 
top branches of this tree may be seen. 
On one of the benches of the Square 
Father Dube confessed to Dr. Peters the 
unhappiness of his mistaken avocation, 
and advised the latter to brighten his life 
by marrying the Midge. At the Univer- 
sity Place corner of the Square Dr. Peters 
and Paul Hathaway, to whom the Midge 
was ultimately married, had their first 

105 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

meeting. A few years ago, when the 
University of New York buildings were 
torn down, there disappeared the Last 
traces of Chrysalis College, used by Theo- 
dore Winthrop in Cecil Dreeme. The 
same time marked the passing of the 
little church in which Katherine Lauder- 
dale and John Ralston were married. 



III. THE GARIBALDI — BRASSERIE PIGAULT — 
THE CASA NAPOLEON 

As one goes down Macdougal Street 
from the southwest corner of Washing- 
ton Square, where the French quarter of 
former days merged into the Greenwich 
Village of former days, the second house 
on the left-hand side, No. 146, is a three- 
story trellised-stoop structure that is rap- 
idly going the way of most of the houses 
of this vicinity. Behind a long, narrow 
table covered with dirty white oilcloth, 
that stands close to the basement win- 

lOG 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

dows, directly under the balcony, an an- 
cient and toothless Italian vends soft 
drinks. The house is tenanted by three 
or four Italian families. People ac- 
quainted with this part of New York will 
remember that a very few years ago this 
])uilding was occupied by a rather pre- 
tentious Franco-Italian hotel. A number 
of years before it was frequented by Bun- 
ner, James L. Ford, Brander Matthews, 
and other newspaper men and artists, and 
as such it was used by Mr. Ford in his 
humorous sketch ' ' Bohemia Invaded ' ' 
under the name of the Garibaldi. The 
Garibaldi was a basement restaurant, and 
the yard in the rear beyond the window, 
guarded by thick iron bars, was littered 
with old casks. Here Tommy Steele and 
Charlie Play and Kitty Bainbridge of the 
Merry Idlers and all the gay Bohemians 
held high carnival until young Etchley, 
the artistic person, made his appearance 
and precipitated the onslaught of the 
Philistines. The grated window in the 
109 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

rear, througii which CharUe Play passed 
in his caustic commeiits on the restau- 
rant's commercial hahifueSj is still to be 




THK GARIBALDIS BAUKED WINDOW. — JAMES L. FORD! 
"BOHEMIA INVADED." 



seen. What was then the dinino^-room 
has since been partitioned into a number 
of little living rooms. 

110 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

M3U0yi3a3JJIVAJA 
TJUAOn .L 

Fi33a H3aAj 

23IDMA^a.23HIW3Hn 
.2J1U3UDIJ DMA 

With the above strange and pleasant 
conceit, Mr. Bunner introduced the read- 
ers of The Midge to the Brasserie Pigault, 
that quaint and mysterious haunt of Di'. 
Peters, and Father Dube, and Parker 
Prout, the old artist, who had failed in 
his career because of too much talent, 
and M, Martin and old Potcun, who lost 
his mind after his wife's death, and Ovid 
Marie, the curly-haired music-teacher 
from Amity Street. It was as printed 
above that the patrons of the old 
wine-shop saw and liked best its sign. 
Thoughts of that sign and of the warmth 
111 



JVFW YOBK IN FICTION 

and comfort and cleanliness within, and 
of Madame Pigault, neat and cornel}', 
knitting — now knitting t' other side of 
Styx — and of the sawdnst-covered floor, 
and of the little noises of a gentle sort 
inspired Mr. Bunner to that fine anti- 
prohibition sermon in which he showed 
with trnth and keen hnmonr the " esti- 
mable gentlemen who go about this broad 
land denouncing the Demon Drink," that 
there were wine-shops not wholly iniqui- 
tous and that bred not crime, but gentle- 
ness and good cheer. But not only is 
there no trace of the Brasserie Pigault; 
it is doubtful if it ever had any tangible 
existence. Brasserie Pigault, Mr. Ford, 
who knew Bunner in the early days, 
says, was any one of the quaint little 
French wine-shops of which there were 
so many in the quarter to the south of 
Washington Square in the later seventies 
and early eighties. 

No. 159 Grreene Street, the site of the 
old French bakery mentioned in Tlie 

112 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

Midge ^ is to-day occupied by a tall office 
building. On Houston Street, near what 
was then South Fifth Avenue, was the 
shop of Groubaud, the dealer in feathers, 
where died Lodviska Leezvinski, the 
mother of the Midge. Charlemagne's, 
where Peter and the Midge went often 
to dine, was probably the Restaurant du 
Grand Vatel on Bleecker Street. The 
Grand Vatel has also passed into history, 
its site being now occupied by an Italian 
restaurant and lodging-house. Pfaif's 
cellar, the resort of the literary wits 
during the sixties and early seventies, 
was on the corner of Bleecker Street and 
Broadway. Mr. Ho wells has written en- 
tertainingly of Pfaff's in his literary 
reminiscences. 

" De Duchess," Chimmie Fadden, his 
friend " de barkeep," and the hitter's 
" loidy fren," during one of their outings 
in the city strolled down South Fifth 
Avenue and lunched together at the res- 
taurant of the White Pup. The identity 

8 113 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 



of the White Pup is obvious enough. It 
has served several times as a background 
for fiction, and was only very recently 
used by Miss Ellen Glasgow for one of 
the New York scenes of The Descendant. 
Recrossing Washington Square and mov- 
ing up Fifth Avenue, we find at 19 and 
21 West Ninth Street the little Franco- 
Spanish South-American Hotel, which 
was the original of the Casa Napoleon, 
the modest and inviting hostelry where 
lived so many of Mr. Thomas Janvier's 
men and women, — Mrs. Myrtle Vane, 
who did the New York society news for 
Western papers; Mr. Dunbar and Miss 
Bream, Mr. Witherby and Mrs. Mor- 
timer, the web-spinning capitalist in a 
small way — the home of the genial Du- 
vant and the refuge of the family Effe- 
rati. " Janvier knows his New York," 
once said John Breslin, — high praise, for 
few have known the city as did the old 
fire chief. His comments on the New 
York of some of the other writers were 
more forceful and less polite. 

114 




THE ("ASA NAPOLEON. — JANVIER AND HOWELLS. 



J^FW YORK IN FICTION 

The Casa Napoleon has another liter- 
ary interest. This was the little restan- 
rant to which Mr. Howells sent Ray (in 
The World of Chancf) during the young 
writer's first weeks in New York, and 
it was here also that the Marches of A 
Hazard of New Foyfuncs came to dine dur- 
ing the long weeks spent in futile flat- 
hunting. Mr. Janvier, who at such 
times as he is in New York is a frequent 
visitor at the Casa Napoleon, dwelt at 
length on the establishment's " attractive 
look," and the balcony that ran along 
the line of the second-story windows, in 
which flowers were growing in great 
green wooden tubs. The Louis Napo- 
leon of Mr. Janvier's stories is Louis 
Napoleon Griffon. The Dunbars, Breams, 
Witherbys, and the rest have taken their 
departure, but in their place there has 
sprung up another coterie of newspaper 
men, flippantly and facetiously known as 
''the Griffon push." 

In the odd little white frame building 

117 



NJfJW YORK IN FICTION 

that in bygone years was No. 58 J 
West Tenth Street, Frederick Olyphant, 




IN THE OASA NAPOLEON. — JANVIER AND IIOWELLS. 



who figures in Brander Matthews' s The 

Last Meetiufj, had his studio. Tlie house 

was reached from West Tenth Street by 

118 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

passing through a dim alley, " worn by 
the feet of three generations of artists." 
This structure, which holds a very im- 
portant place in the New York of fiction, 
will be described at length in the fol- 
lowing section. The artist life about 
Tenth Street was also the theme of the 
Van Dyke Brown stories. On Eleventh 
Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 
is the building in which Fulkerson, Con- 
rad Dryfoos, and Basil March conducted 
Every Other Weeh. Mr. Howells had in 
mind one of the renovated old houses 
which line the street. It was on Union 
Square, in front of Brentano's, that Mar- 
garet Vance and Conrad Dryfoos met for 
the last time before the latter was killed 
in the great strike. In writing about 
this strike Mr. Howells drew upon his 
impressions of the railway strike of 1882 
when an innocent spectator met his 
death in much the same manner as did 
Dryfoos in the novel. 



119 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 



IV. RICHARD HARDING DAVIS — VAN BH^BER'S 
HAUNTS — GREENWICH VILLAGE — SCENES 
OF EDGAR FAAVCETT'S NOVELS 

Richard Harding Davis strikes his 
highest, l)est, and most human note when 
telling of men and women lonely and 
homesick in other lands. The nostalgia 
has been strong upon him. It has been 
treasured in his memory, and at times 
the balm of spring air, some subtle odour 
of perfume or flower, a picture, a line in 
a book or a letter, brings over him with 
remarkable vividness the same sensations 
of strange, overwhelming loneliness that 
he has felt some time in the years gone 
by when he was knocking about some- 
where a few thousand miles away from 
the lights of Broadway and the tall tower 
of the Madison Square Garden. This 
note dominates all his work in which he 
finds his background in other lands. He 
has used it very effectively a number of 
times, and yet it does not seem to grow 

120 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

stale. It is a nostalgia that comes upon 
strong men, never maudlin, never weakly 
sentimental, but a great yearning home- 
sickness, that expresses itself feelingly, 
simply, colloquially. Near the end of Tlie 
Exiles, Holcombe, the New York assistant 
district-attorney, leaving Tangiers, asks 
Meakin, the police commissioner who 
had been indicted for blackmailing gam- 
bling-houses, if he cannot do something 
for him at home. In the latter' s reply 
we have what is probably the most power- 
ful and sincere bit of writing that Mr. 
Davis has ever done. It is here quoted 
entire : 

" ' I "11 tell you what you can do for me, Hol- 
combe. Some night I wish you would go down 
to F'ourteenth Street, some night this spring, when 
the boys are sitting out on the steps in front of the 
Hall, and just take a drink for me at Ed Lally's ; 
just for luck. That 's what I 'd like to do. 1 
don't know nothing better than Fourteenth Street 
of a summer evening, with all the people crowd- 
ing into Pastor's on one side of the Hall and the 
121 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Third Avenue L cars running by on the other. 
That 's a gay sight, ain't it now ? With all the 
girls coming in and out of Theiss's, and the side- 
walks crowded. One of them warm nights when 
they have to have the windows open, and you can 
hear the music in at Pastor's and the audience 
clapping their hands. That's great, isn't it?' 
Well, he laughed, and he shook his head. ' I'll be 
back there some day, won't I ? ' he said wistfully, 
' and hear it for myself.' " 

Turning- from Meakin to the versatile 
Van Bibber, we find at the corner of 
Ninth Street and University Place the 
French restaurant (Hotel Martin) from 
which he started out as " Best Man." 
The tables at which Van Bibber and the 
runaway couple were dining are in the 
one-story addition that runs along Ninth 
Street. On the steps running down from 
the hotel entrance to the sidewalk of 
University Place Van Bibber met the 
groom's elder brother, and promptly sent 
him off to Chicago. Later he wished it 
had been Jersey City. A block to the 

122 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

west, at the northwest corner of Ninth 
Street and Fifth Avenue, is the house in 
which Van Bibber came upon his peni- 




WHERE VAN UIBBER FOUND THE RUNAWAY COUPLE. — 
R. H. DAVIS'S "van HIBBER AS BEST MAN." 

tent burglar. At the northeast corner of 
Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue is the 
Mission House before which Lena died 
(E. W. Townsend's "By whom the 
Offence Cometh"). 

123 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Biiuner coined a striking phrase when 
he spoke of the " bourgeois conservatism 




WHEKE VAN I5IP.HER FOUND THK BURGLAR. — R. II. DAVIS. 

of Greenwich ViUage." But that was 
written many years ago, before the inva- 
sion of the old American Avard by the 
124 



JSTFW YORK IN FICTION 

foreign element had really begun, and 
when a few minutes' walk from the tall 




HOl'SE BEFORE WHICH LENA 1>IEI). E. W . lOWNSENDS 

'' BY WHOM THE OFFENCE COMETH." 

clock tower of Jefferson Market whisked 
one back to the atmosphere and condi- 

125 



NEW YOUK IN FICTION 

tions of the early half of the century. 
The sight of that tall clock tower filled 
the soul of Chad {Colonel Carter of 
CarfersriUe) with unutterable bitterness. 
Brander Matthews, in one of his Man- 
Jiaftan Vignettes, speaks of John Suydani 
noting the " high roof and lofty terrace 
above all the yawning baskets of vege- 
tables and the pendent turkeys." In 
"Aunt Eliza's Triumph" Mr. Townsend 
takes us to Grreenwich Village, Aunt Eliza 
living in a house on Bank Street. 

Edgar Fawcett, in the story of A New 
York Family, pointed out the significant 
fact that all the great capitals of history, 
after many hesitant swerves and recoils, 
have taken a steadfast western course. 
This feature, however, is probably less 
true of our own than of any other 
metropolis of modern times. Chelsea 
and Greenwich Village were thriving 
populated communities when the eastern 
X)ortion of the city of the same latitude 
was farm and swamp land. Mr. Faw- 

126 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

cett's work is an excellent illustration of 
the element that is lacking* in the local 
colour of the New York of fiction. He 
is strenuous, indomitably persistent, un- 
doubtedly sincere. His descriptions are 
apparently laboriously and conscien- 
tiously wrought. But they are too often 
unconvincing. Much is to be said of his 
treatment of quaint corners of suburban 
New York, of Brooklyn, of Grreenpoint, 
of Hoboken. These places, however, be- 
long to a later paper. One of the houses 
of the picturesque Colonnade Row in La- 
fayette Place was the home of Mrs. Rus- 
sell Leroy, described in .1 Hopeless Case. 
The old church at the southern end of 
Lafayette Place mentioned in the novel 
was St. Bartholomew's. The dwelling- 
houses on the east side of the street dis- 
appeared years ago. Moving westward 
again, passing Grace Church, which Mr. 
Fawcett describes as "looming up a tall 
and stately sentinel at the upper end of 
Broadway," and the St. Denis Hotel, 
127 



KEW YORK IN FICTION 



where Basil and Isabel March (A Hazard 
of New Fortunes) stayed durino- their 




NO. t)S CI.INI'ov I'l.ACK. .TANVIKR's "a TEMPOHAltY 

DEADLOCK." 

hivasions of New York, we find m West 

Tenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth 

aYcnues, the home of Spencer Dela- 

128 



J^FW YORK IN FICTION 

plaine, the husband of Olivia Delaplaine 
in Mr. Fawcett's novel of that name. 
Two blocks away, at the Brevoort, 
lived Clinton Wainwright, Mr. Fawcett's 
" Gentleman of Leisure." One of Mr. 
Fawcett's most vigorous descriptions oc- 
curs where, in this book, he contrasts 
lower Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. 
Directly across the street from the Bre- 
voort, on the east side of the avenue, 
is No. 68 Clinton Place, interesting as 
being not only the scene, but the raison 
cVHre, of Thomas Janvier's A Temporary 
Deadlock. In one of the Fifth Avenue 
houses near here lived the Huntingdons 
of Edgar Fawcett's A Hopeless Case. 



V. CRAWFORD'S NEW YORK — OLD SECOND 
AVENUE — GRAMERCY PARK — COLONEL CAR- 
TER'S HOME 

F. Marion Crawfokd belongs to a race 
of novelists — a race whose influence is 
likely to dominate the lighter literature 

9 129 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

of the early half of the twentieth cen- 
tury — who are nntrammellecl by circum- 
stance of mere creed or speech; who 
turn to their work with a recognition 
of the great fundamental principle that 
human nature is everywhere pretty much 
the same, — that love, hatred, avarice, jeal- 
ousy, make romance equally in Madagas- 
car and Maine. The storj^-tellers of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
wrote of soils other than their own for 
the purpose of giving their extravagances 
the appearance of reality and verisimili- 
tude. They sat down to their writing- 
tables in much the same spirit as Tar- 
tarin started for Algiers. The Spain of 
Le Sage and Beaumarchais was as 
strange, as delightful, and as unreal as 
the country of the Liliputians or the 
Brobdignagians. Thackeray in all his 
more important stories took his men and 
women at some time in the narrative to 
Paris or Weimar or Rome, but it was to 
the British society of these places that 

130 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

he introduced us, — a society which car- 
ried with it its usages, its prejudices, — 
its Lares and Penates. Among contem- 
porary writers Mr. Davis, invading the 
shores of the Mediterranean and imagi- 
nary South American repubhcs for local 
colour, must take with him a few men 
and women out of Mr. Gibson's sketch 
book to establish himself soundly; and 
Mr. Anthony Hope needed an English- 
man to carry him through Ruritania. 
Even Mr. Kipling, so persistently hailed 
as the trumpeter of world-wide litera- 
ture, has confined himself almost entirely 
to English-speaking people. His tales of 
native life are exotic. Mr. Crawford is 
more typically the pioneer. So dis- 
tinctly is he a cosmopolitan, that his 
New York stories in no way compare 
with the splendid Saracinesca series; in 
the former he fails to make us feel the 
vastness, the complexity of the metro- 
politan life that is behind his men and 
women. In finding a home for the Lau- 

131 



NUW YORK IN FICTION 

derdales, Mr. Crawford obviously made 
use of the vine-covered residence of Mr. 
Richard Watson Gilder, to which he has 
been a frequent visitor, on the north side 
of Clinton Place, a few doors east of 
Fifth Avenue. He speaks of Clinton 
Place never having been a fashionable 
thoroughfare, although it once lay in a 
fashionable neighbourhood. Farther east 
on Clinton Place, in " an odd, old struc- 
ture tenanted by Bohemians," lived Paul 
Hathaway {The Midge). Again taking 
up Mr. Crawford's New York, the second 
house of Colonnade Row, opposite the 
Astor Library, was the home of Walter 
Crowdie and his wife Hester. A little 
garden, surrounded by an iron railing, 
separates the house from the street. 
These white houses, with their tall pillars 
and deep balconies, are among the most 
interesting and picturesque relics of the 
older New York. One of them was used 
by Mrs. Burton Harrison in The Anglo- 
maniacs. John Ralston and Katharine 

132 




^usmr^a^issf- 



lpii i.l| ij i l| l il |illi H. I H i i ii iiiLi.. 'ii'' i nr n r" 




THE CKowniliS HOME, I.AlAVETTli I'LACE. — K. .MARK)N t'lf A W EOlt D S 
"the RALSTONS." 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Lauderdale, on their spring-day walk 
strolled uj) Stuyvesant Street and passed 
St. Mark's Church and on to Tompkins 
Square with its broad walks and hordes 
of screaming children — Julian Ral]^h 
has written of these in People We Pd.^s — 
and beyond across the lettered avenues to 
the timber-yard at the water's edge. On 
Avenue B was the canary-bird shop of 
Andreas Stoffel, of Mr. Janvier's An 
Idyll of the Fast Side. 

Claire Twining, in Edgar Fawcett's 
An Amhitious Woman, noted the '' wide, 
airy expanse of the Square lighted with 
innumerable lamps," on her wild flight 
from Slocumb after the outbreak of fire 
in Niblo's Theatre. In this story Mr. 
Fawcett refers to the time when Tomp- 
kins Square was a " dark horror to all 
decent citizens living near it." By day 
set aside as a parade ground for the city 
militia, which paraded there scarcely 
twice a year, its lampless lapse of earth 
was by night at least four acres of brood- 
135 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

ing gloom, and he who ventured to cross 
it stood the risk of thieving assault, if 
of nothing more harmful. 

The Grosvenors lived in a big, dingy 
mansion on Second Avenue, near Stuy- 
vesant and Rutherford squares, which 
neighbourhood Mr. Fawcett has spoken 
of as " one of the few fragments that 
have been left uninvaded by the merci- 
less spirit of change." Near by, in a little 
red brick house, dwelt Mrs. Montgomery, 
of Henry James's Washhuiton Square; 
and Bunner has told us how at night the 
strong wind used to blow the music of 
St. George's bells half across the city to 
the Midge's ears. " It was as though 
Stuyvesant Square snugly locked up for 
the night sent a midnight message of re- 
proach to the broader and more demo- 
cratic ground, whose hard walks knew 
no rest from echoing footsteps in light or 
dark." In one of the houses facing the 
north side of the Square lived the social- 
ist Dircks and his daughter Esther, the 

136 



JVEW YORK IN FICTION 

heroint^ of Brander Matthews's A Confi- 
dent To-morrow. Farther down, near the 




ERNEST NEUMAN S HOME. — HENRY IIARLAND S 
" AS IT WAS WRITTEN." 



avenue's southern extremity, we find on 
the northwe^st corner of Second Street 
the large red brick house where Ernest 

137 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Neuman went to live under an assumed 
name after his release from the Tomhs 
Prison, where he had been on trial for the 
murder of his betrothed, as described in 
Henry Harland's^i-s- /if Was Written. The 
Karons of the same writer's Mrs. Peixada 
lived between Sixth and Seventh streets, 
and across the way was the pawnshop 
of Bernard Peixada, " a brick house, 
although the bricks were concealed by 
a coat of dark grey stucco that blotches 
here and there had made almost black." 
The pawnbroking establishment was on 
the ground floor, and the broad windows 
in front were protected, like those of 
a jail, by heavy iron bars. In these 
windows were musical instruments, house- 
hold ornaments, kitchen utensils, firearms, 
tarnished uniforms, women's faded 
gewgaws and finery, and behind these, 
darkness, mystery, and gloom. The three 
upper stories were hermetically sealed 
and wore a sinister and ill-omened 
aspect. There is, however, no structure 

138 




i^/ r / #-nrT/ 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

in the neighbourhood even remotely sug- 
gestive of this shop. 

At the corner of Eighteenth Street and 
Fifth Avenue was the house of Uncle 
Larry Laughton (Brander Matthews' s 
TJie Last Meeting), \vheve the Full Score 
Club met the evening that Frederick Oly- 
phant was " shanghaied " by the man 
with the Black Heart. The original of 
Laurence Laughton was Laurence Hut- 
ton, and the house in question was the 
home of Professor Matthews' s father. 
The scene of the dinner in The Last 
Meeting was the library, to which was 
transferred, for the purposes of the 
storj^, Laurence Hutton's famous collec- 
tion of death masks. 

Crossing from here to Gramercy Park, 
we find at No. 2 the home of Mr. Grifford 
Pinchot, used by F. Hopkinson Smith as 
the residence of Mrs. Leroy in CaJeh West. 
It was here that Caleb's wife found a ref- 
uge after her flight with Lally. The house 
at the west corner of Lexington Avenue 

141 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

and the Park was probably the home of 
Royal Weldon, who appears in Edgar 
Saltus's Thp Truth ahout Trisfrem Varich. 



m 





^.«>^.TniiiwniwiFriiMinniimiiiiinn wm\ 



MRS. LEROY S HOUSE, GKAMERCY PAKK. — F. HOPKINSON 
smith's ' CM.KH WEST." 

142 



WEW YORK IN FICTION 



It was in the drawing-room of this house 
that Tristrem Varick drove the needle- 




ROVAL WELDON S HOxME, GRAMEUCY PARK. — 
ED<iAR SALTUS'S " TRISTKEM VARICK." 



like Roman knife home to his host's 
heart. 

The quarters occupied by Colonel Car- 

143 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

ter of Cartersville cliimig that period of 
his life when he was in New York trying 
to interest the agents of English syn- 
dicates in the railroad scheme, the con- 
summation of which would have given 
many of the very first Virginian families 
easy access to the Atlantic Coast, were 
described by F. Hopkinson Smith as be- 
ing in " an old-fashioned, partly fur- 
nished, two-story house, nearly a century 
old, which crouched down behind the 
larger and more modern dwelling front- 
ing on the street," designated in the book 
as Bedford Place. The spot was within 
a stone's throw of the tall clock tower of 
the Jefferson Market. The street en- 
trance to this curious abode was marked 
by a swinging wooden gate, opening into 
a narrow tunnel, which dodged under the 
front house. " It was an uncanny sort of 
passageway, mouldy and wet from a long 
neglected leak overhead, and lighted at 
night by a rusty lantern with dingy glass 
sides." Bedford Place was West Tenth 

144 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Street, and over the swinging wooden 
gate is the number — "58^." Until a 
very few years ago this quaint bit of local 
colour existed in its entirety. Most of it, 
however, was destroyed when Mr. Mait- 
land Armstrong, the owner of the front 
house, No. 58 West Tenth Street, remod- 
elled his own residence. The entrance 
and the eastern half of the white frame 
structure in the rear, where the Colonel 
had his home, remain intact. The 
swinging wooden gate whence " Chad " 
swooped down upon the complacent 
shopkeepers of the quarter was for years 
a familiar landmark of the neighbour- 
hood. It opened into the tunnel directly 
under the stoop of No. 58 as it exists to- 
day. To the west of the gate the steps 
curved up to the door of the front house. 
Peering through the iron gate in front, 
one may see part of the dark, un- 
canny tunnel where the Colonel in- 
dulged in pistol practice preparatory to 
his expected meeting with the broker 
10 145 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Klutcliem. The garden where Fitz and 
the Major took refuge while " Chad " 




COLONEL carter's GATE, PRESENT DAY. — F. HDI'KINSON 
smith's "colonel CARTER OF CARTERSVILLE." 



held the lighted candle as a mark for 
Carter's skill was then between the two 

146 




"the fike is my frienu," said colonel carter. 



COLONEL CARTERS FIREPLACE. — F. HOPKINSOX SJIITH S 
"colonel carter OF CARTERSVILLE." 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

houses. Few traces of it remain, for the 
extension built in the rear of No. 58 
covers the greater part of the ground. 
Those who witnessed the stage presenta- 
tion of Colonel Carter of CartersvUle at 
Pahner's Theatre will doubtless remem- 
ber that the scene of one act is laid in 
the Colonel's dining-room. When the 
play was in preparation, Mr. Smith 
piloted the scenic artist through the 
old building, with the result that the 
long room made familiar to theatre- 
goers as the scene of the Virginian 
Don Quixote's exploits was an exact 
reproduction of the original chamber. 
In the rear may be found the little door 
opening into the hall and the fourteen 
little white wooden steps by which Car- 
ter and his friends mounted to the upper 
stor}^ of the structure, where from one 
of the west windows " Chad," looking 
out into the night, saw the tall, illumi- 
nated tower of " de jail" looming up 
ominous and mysterious. A few hun- 

149 



N'EW YOBK IN FICTION 

dred yards away, on Sixth Avenue, was 
the cellar saloon patronised by Carter 
and his Virginian friends. Mr. Smith 
recognises three dominant types in 
American life. From Colonel Cfuipv of 
Carfersvillf, in which he attempted to 
portray the old Southern chivalry so 
rapidly passing away, he passed in Tom 
Grogan to the study of the ubiquitous 
Irish-American type. Cahh West com- 
pleted the trilogy with a picture of the 
sturdy life sprung from the New Eng- 
land soil. 



150 



part Cl)rcc 

THE NEW CITY AND SUBURBAN 
NEW YORK 



\;'i,ii0iiiiiiii»iityi- ,.^^ 




part €:i)rcc 

I. NEGLECTED PHASES 

SEVERAL of the chapters of Olivia 
Delaplaine Edgar Fawcett devoted 
to a picture of Mrs. Ottarson's 
boardmg-house, a red brick, high-stooped 
structure on Twenty-third Street, be- 
tween Seventh and Eighth avenues. It 
may be noted here that this house had 
no tangible original. Mr. Fawcett placed 
it for the j^urposes of the story in West 
Twenty-thii'd Street, but always felt it 
to be one of the houses in Fourteenth 
Street, between Seventh and Eighth ave- 
nues, " that domain where the boarding- 
house is ubiquitous." These chapters 
have an interest far beyond their narra- 
tive importance. They call one's atten- 
tion to a field, a phase of New York life, 
wonderfully rich and typical, — a field in 

153 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

which the novelist will not only have a 
small world of contrasts, characters, com- 
plications within fonr walls, but in which 
he will be absolutely untrammelled by 
the traditions or influences of European 
writers. There is no need of going for 
new types and material to the West or 
the Southwest. The boarding-house is, 
on the whole, rather more American than 
Red Gulch or Yuba Bill. The American 
writer may find an inspiration in the 
squabble of the Bayneses, the Bunches, 
and the MacWhirters in The Advoitures 
of Philip or the intrigues of the Maison 
Vauquer of Balzac's Le Pere Goriot. But 
the inspiration must be purely technical. 
Not but that we have had little touches 
of this life: it has been a rich field for 
the joke makers. Mr. John Kendrick 
Bangs has introduced us to its breakfast- 
table and pelted us with its harmless 
if superfluous epigrams. But none has 
treated it seriously in literature or done 
justice to its vulgarity and its tragic 

154 



J\r^Tr YORK IN FICTION 

gloom. In the boarding-house scenes 
of Olivia Velaplaine, passing over the 
very obvions fact that no woman ever 
talked as did Mrs. Ottarson, we feel 
that the Kev. Drowle, the Spillingtons, 
Bankses, and Sugbys are flagrant carica- 
tures, very degenerate descendants of the 
Americans of Martin CliHzzJewit. Mrs. 
Amelia Sugby, purveyor of the literature 
in which chambermaids and factory 
heroines delight, is a type that has been 
so persistently flaunted that it has ceased 
even to bore. Few writers touch even 
remotely on this subject without con- 
temptuous allusion to the floorwalker 
type. But where is the man who will 
lay bare for us this floorwalker's soul; 
this floorwalker's egotism, before the 
light of which the arrogance of the feu- 
dal baron must pale; the floorwalker 
distinction which poisons, vitiates, and 
makes ridiculous the social systems of 
the communities in the neighbourhood 
of great cities! 

155 



JVEW YORK IN FICTION 

Boarding-house life, vulgar as it is, is 
too great and too vitally American to be 
treated merely in caricature. We have 
seen somewhat inadequately its laughable 
pretence, its amusing vanity, its sham 
elegance. But the man who treats its 
shabby gentility seriously, who can grasp 
its power, its intrigue, its passion, its 
pathos, will come very near to giving us 
the great American novel. 

By all odds the most puerile and un- 
reasonable complaint that one hears from 
literary workers is that the more obvious 
and inviting themes have all been worked 
threadbare, and that one in search of 
originality must go to the improbable and 
bizarre. This is far from being abso- 
lutely true of any literature; in this 
country the complaint is, on the face of 
it, absurd. One can suggest, almost off- 
hand, other phases of American life that 
not only have not been worn threadbare, 
but have in reality never been fully 
discovered. 

156 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

For instance, we should have very little 
hesitation in predicting success to the 
young man of industry and real literary 
talent who will thoroughly study the life 
of the conventional American small town, 
— not especiall}^ the New England town 
or the Western or the Southern town, but 
the American town. Let him study all 
the factors of this really complex life and 
their relations toward each other. Let 
him keep well in hand his sense of hu- 
mour, study the social life, its distinc- 
tions, its complications, its scandals; let 
him know the local newspaper offices, the 
tax-receiver's office; above all, let him 
know every detail of the town's political 
life, the aspirations of prospective coun- 
cilnien, the men whose votes are for sale 
and the men who buy them ; and when he 
really knows all this he will have the ma- 
terial for not one but a dozen strong and 
vitally interesting novels. This sugges- 
tion may be offered to a young man, but 

hardly to a young woman. In the first 
157 



N^UW YORK IN FICTION 

place, she will not see it, and then she 
would ignore it if she did. A young 
woman who writes and who aspires to 
treat realistically of this very life to 
which we allude recently blandly con- 
fessed that she had no idea of what a 
" primary " was, though she surmised that 
it had something to do with the Board of 
Education. She was quite satisfied and 
content. Politics were vulgar, and, be- 
sides, what had they to do with fiction! 
What she Avas after was the "love inter- 
est." Well, the " love interest " should, 
perhaps, not be ignored, but the fact re- 
mains that it is a fetichism which has 
spoiled many good novels and many good 
plays, and that absurd belief in the cant 
phrase is one of the greatest barriers in 
the way of true and good literature. 

Probably no profession but that of the 
clergyman has been treated in American 
fiction with any degree of adequacy. The 
physician's has not ; the newspaperman's 
has not, despite the flattering partiality of 

158 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

feminine purveyors of fiction for '' brainy 
young journalists." The term " literary 
man ' ' was once one of dignity and. re- 
spectability ; and yet so much has it 
been abused that it is doubtful if any 
sane, normal, intelligent man will hear it 
applied to himself with perfect equa- 
nimity. Any ill-balanced witness in a 
police court case and without ostensible 
occupation may be relied on to inform the 
court that he is a " literary man." And 
this is the type that the public takes quite 
seriously, just as it greedily swallows the 
"journalist" of feminine fiction who 
writes manuscript and is " kind " to 
mere reporters. 

But of all the professions, the richest 
in un worked literary material is probablj^ 
that of the law. One could not easily 
overestimate the debt w^hich the whole 
great scheme of the Comedie Humaine 
owes to the brief period of his early life 
which Honore de Balzac spent in the 

lo'J 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

office of a notary. It was there that he 
got at the very heart of modern life. 
There he learned the meaning of money, 
not in its vnlgar sense, but as a great 
moving and working factor and force in 
human society. That period was brief, 
but then and there was laid the founda- 
tion upon which the whole fabric of the 
Come die was raised stone by stone. It is 
between the lines of the lawyer's brief 
that much of the real romance of the 
future will be found. A well-known so- 
ciological writer with whom we recently 
discussed the subject suggested that in the 
history of the New York Bar there was 
enough material to furnish a different 
plot to every man and woman who as- 
pired to write a novel. We rather feel 
that he overestimated the New York Bar. 
However, he told what he said was a typ- 
ical story, vouching for the accuracy of 
every detail ; and this story we must con- 
cede was simply wonderful in its dra- 
matic elements. It concerned a former 

160 



JVFW YORK IN FICTION 

New York District Attorney, a New York 
daily newspaper, and one of the most no- 
torious murder trials in the history of the 
country. It let in a full flood of light 
upon events familiar to every New 
Yorker. It treated of people whose 
names are known wherever an American 
newspaper is read. In short, it was a 
story containing every element of ro- 
mance to such a degree that if served up 
as fiction it would probably be branded 
as downright sensationalism by a reading 
public which seems to think that the 
novel to be true to life nnist deal essen- 
tially with five-o'clock-tea ideas and twi- 
light dialogue. 

A man cannot spend very many days 
wandering about his New York without 
stumbling ui)on corners and neighbour- 
hoods seemingly designed for no other 
purpose than to give contrast and local 
colour to the maker of fiction. He need 
not go far out of his way in the search. 
They will flash by him as he peers out of 

11 101 



J^EW YORK IN FICTION 

windows of elevated trains, — bits of green 
high up on roof tops, glimpses of rear- 
tenement life. The closes leading from 
both sides of the Canon Gate, the Cow- 
gate and the High Street, which no 
American visiting Edinburgh would al- 
low himself to miss, are no more pictu- 
resque and are infinitely less interesting 
as spectacles of human life than our 
own rear tenements. Many of the most 
picturesque of these were swept away 
with the reclamation of Mulberry Bend. 
There are still many throughout the 
Grhetto, among the streets lying under 
the Bridge, and here and there higher up 
on the east and west sides. Some strik- 
ing back tenements exist, or existed until 
recently, between East Thirty-second 
and East Thirty-third streets, near the 
river. A few years hence this phase of 
New York life is likely to have passed 
away, and if this book provokes one 
reader to a closer acquaintance with the 
rear tenements of New York, it will not 

162 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

have been written in vain. A piquant 
and perhaps morbid curiosity for the 
darkness and gloom of a great city is 
the heritage of Dickens. James L. Ford 
in Hie Literary Shop described, it will be 
remembered, the barbed-wire fence that 
magazine magnates had stretched across 
the city at Cooper Union, and below 
which no purveyor of New York fiction 
with an eye to disposing of his work 
could discreetly go. As must be the 
case with any book of real satire, it was 
based upon a good deal of truth. It is 
probably due to the fact that the treat- 
ment of low life in our fiction is of com- 
paratively recent origin that so much of 
the darker strata of New York has been 
ignored. 

Whatever of his books may be pre- 
ferred by the reader, it will usually Ix' 
found that among the bits of London of 
which Dickens wrote there is none that 
has exercised a greater and more holding 
a charm than the debtor's prison of the 
163 



NUW YORK IN FICTION 

Marshalsea. To the normal well-dressed 
Londoner residing, let us say, somewhere 
in Hammersmith or the neighbourhood 
of St. John's Wood, the vast region 
" over the river " means something a 
little mysterious and weird. Blot out 
that part of Paris which lies " over the 
river," and the loss to literature would 
be infinitely more far-reaching. There 
lie the streets trod by Messieurs Atlios, 
Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan, the 
scenes of one-half of what is greatest 
in the CoDtedie Huwaine of Jean Valjean's 
skulking pilgriuiages, of the light loves, 
the foHrheries, the poignant sufferings of 
Murger's men and women. The Thames 
and the Seine ! Both are pregnant with 
literary significance. We have two 
rivers; but our novelists seem to find 
no inspiration in studying them by light 
or dark; our poets don't pipe their little 
lays over their darkness, their mystery, 
their tragedy, their treachery, their si- 
lence. For the " over the river " in New 
164 




THE BERKELEY. — K. H. IJAVIS. 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

York fiction we must rely on the future. 
Yet not far from the river on the Brook- 
lyn side, near to the Sands Street gate of 
the Navy Yard, is a series of little alleys 
quite as dirty, as picturesque, as rich in 
suggestion as the alleys of Dickens's Lon- 
don. Again might be pointed out Fort 
Lee and the Sound side of Staten Island, 
with the looming chimneys of Constable 
Hook. Years ago, in one of those juve- 
nile publications then the source of end- 
less delight, appeared serially a story of 
which the mise-en-sceue was on board a 
canal-boat which lay at anchor in the 
Bay of Growanus. Gowanus! There is 
one reader at least to whom the sight or 
sound of that word still thrills and charms 
— by whom that early impression of dark- 
ness and gloom shall never be forgotten. 

II. MADISON SQUARE — THE BERKELEY — 
MANHATTAN CLUB — POVERTY FLAT 

Of recent years Madison Square seems 
to have an influence over the novelists 
165 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

of New York something akin to that so 
long wielded by the trees and asphalt of 
Washington Square. There is in the 
turmoil, the Hght, the rush of the former 
something very typical of New York life. 
The tall tower of the Grarden looming 
high over the adjacent structures has af- 
forded our writers an inspiration which 
they occasionally use with singular felic- 
ity. That tower is one of the staple 
subjects of conversation of Mr. Davis's 
heroes and heroines when they happen 
to be in South America or Tangiers — or 
on board steamers in the South Atlantic 
— any place sufficiently distant from New 
York. The hero of one of Brander Mat- 
thews's Viyupttfs of Maiiliattan, the fail- 
ure in life, pointed out of Delmonico's 
windows and confessed to his friend of 
the old college days that he would die 
out of sight of that tower. Many of 
the old landmarks that have passed away 
in recent years were linked with the 
Square's associations in earlier fiction. 

166 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Long before the idea of the huge garden 
was ever conceived the old Brunswick 
served as the scene of many of the epi- 
sodes of Mr. Fawcett's novels. On Fifth 
Avenue, a little below the Square, in 
the heart of what is now the publishing 
district, lived the Satterthwaites of his 
Olivia Delaplaine. 

On Twenty-third Street, a block to 
the east of the Square, is the School of 
Art used by Mr. Ho wells in The Coast of 
Bohemia; and at the northeast corner 
of the Square and Twenty-fourth Street 
is the home of Ezra Pierce of Brander 
Matthews's His Father's Son. 

Across the city, at Twenty-sixth Street 
and the East River, Hamilton Knox 
(J. L. Williams, "The Cub Reporter 
and the King of Spain ") used to dangle 
his feet over the water and watch the 
incoming ferryboats while waiting for 
Morgue news. There has been among 
college men, especially among Princeton 
men, considerable speculation as to the 

169 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

identity of Hamilton Knox. Hamilton 
Knox was drawn from Frank Morse, 
the Princeton half-back of the 1893 
Eleven. 

Two blocks to the north, on the south- 
east corner of the avenue and Twenty- 
eighth Street, is the "Berkeley Flats," 
described by Richard Harding- Davis in 
Her First Appearance. It was here that 
the irrepressible Van Bibber brought the 
little girl whose acquaintance he had 
made two hours before in the theatre 
green-room. The apartment of Carruth- 
ers must have been in one of the upper 
stories of the building, for Mr. Davis 
speaks of Van Bibber looking out 
tlirough the window and down upon 
the lights of Madison Square and the 
boats in the East River. This story was 
written by Mr. Davis in Twenty-eighth 
Street, only a stone's throw from the 
" Berkeley," and the illustrations which 
accompanied the story were drawn from 
one of the " Berkeley " apartments. Re- 
no 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

turniiiij^ to Madison Square, the Garden 
Theatre in introduced in one of Brand er 
Matthews' s Vignettes of Manhattan. It 
was there that John Stone, the naval 
officer, and Clay Magruder, the cowboy, 
saw Patience the night before the burn- 
ing of the hotel where they were staying. 
The "Apollo" Hotel mentioned in so 
many of Professor Matthews' s sketches 
and stories of New York life was drawn 
from the Belvidere Hotel, at Eighteenth 
Street and Fourth Avenue. At No. 5 
East Twenty-ninth Street is the Church 
of the Transfiguration, better known as 
" The Little Church around the Corner." 
It was there that Van Bibber, acting as 
"Best Man," sent the young eloping 
couple whom he had found dining on the 
Terrace at the Hotel Martin. Brander 
Matthews calls it " The Little Church 
down the Street," and makes it the scene 
and the raison cVetre of his most char- 
acteristic tale — the story of the actor's 
funeral, with its blood-red climax, the 
173 



NEW YORK TN FICTION 

bearers passing stolidly down the aisle 
unconsciously heedless of " the dry-eyed 




MANHATTAN CLUB. — P. L. FORD's " THE HONOURABLE 
PETER STIRLING." 

mother of the dead man's unborn child." 
The curious arched entrance at the street 

174 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

gate was erected about four years ago, 
and was of course not mentioned by 
Professor Matthews in his graphic de- 
scription of the church. Crossing the 
avenue, we find, at the corner of Thirty- 
fourth Street, the home of the Manliat- 
tan Chib, soon to be torn down. It was 
there that was held the meeting which 
resulted in the nomination of the Hon- 
ourable Peter Stirling for the governor- 
ship of New York. A few blocks farther 
north brings us to the Grand Central 
Station which Mr. Howells has described 
in Tlieir Wedding Jout'ncj) and .1 Hazard 
of New Fortunes, and which plays a very 
conspicuous and dramatic part in Mr. 
Paul Leicester Ford's The HonouraJde 
Peter Stirling. 

On the north side of Thirty-third 
Street, a few doors west of Sixth Avenue, 
is the Cayuga Flat, which, under the 
name of " Poverty Flat," has figured in 
many of James L. Ford's short, satiric 
studies of New York life. In the Cayuga 

175 



N^UW YORK IN FICTION 

took place " A Dinner in Poverty Flat," 
and it was the scene of many of the ex- 




^••'iMiiH 



"poverty flat." J. L. FOKU. 



ploits of the amiable Police Captain Fat- 
wallet. The hero of Richard Harding 

17G 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

Davis's " A Walk up the Avenue " hav- 
ing broken with his fiancee, approaching 
the hill at Thirtieth Street, is filled with 
satisfaction at the thought of his new- 
found freedom. At Thirty-second Street 
this satisfaction is changed to discontent. 
By the time he is passing the Reservoir 
at Forty-second Street he has made up 
his mind that he will always remain a 
bachelor. The sight of the tall white 
towers of the Cathedral at Fiftieth Street 
looming up before him makes him think 
with a great, wistful sadness of his meet- 
ing her some time in the far distant 
future. At the entrance to the Park 
come remorse, meeting, and reconciliation. 



III. HENRY IIARLANirS SCENES — BEE:K MAN 
I'LACE AND THE TERRACE - ABOUT CEN- 
TRAL PARK — THE UPPER WEST SIDE 

Heney Harland began his literary 
career when he was working in the Sur- 
rogate's Office and living in his father's 
12 177 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

house in Beekmaii Place. This quaint 
bit of New York, perched high up on the 
city's eastern brink, opposite the southern 
extremity of BlackwelFs Island, and com- 



. 




" TlIK KlVEli, THE rENlTEXTIARY AND THE SMOKE EROJl 
THE OIL FACTORIES OF IIUNTEr's POINT." 



nianding a fine view of the penitentiary, 
the river, and the oil factories of Hunter's 
Point, was the scene of all his earlier and 
more vigorous work, written over the 
no}n (hj f/iicrrf of Sidney Luska. At that 

178 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

time Mr. Harland was obliged to resort 
to a most rigid plan of literary work, 
carried out by him with the self-abnega- 
tion and energy of a Balzac. It was his 
custom to go to bed immediately after 
dinner, to rise at two o'clock in the 
morning, and, fortified with strong coffee, 
with a wet towel bound around his head, 
to write undisturbed until it was time for 
breakfast, after which he started down- 
town for his daily work in the Surro- 
gate's Office. The first of his books thus 
produced was As It Wus Written, the 
story of a Jewish musician, splendidly 
tragic in its conception and scheme. The 
first scene of As it Was Written is laid at 
the Fifty-first Street end of the Terrace. 
It was there that Ernest Neuman first 
found Veronika, one night when the 
moon had risen, a huge red disc out of 
the mist and smoke across the river. 
From the Terrace at this point a long 
flight of white stone steps leads down 
almost to the water's edge. In Mrs. 

179 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Peixada Mr. Harland gave us a long and 
graphic description of Beekman Place. 
He speaks of this unpretentious choco- 




!S3«»^_ -• 




THE TKKKACE. II. lIARLANlj's " AiS IT WA.S WKITTEN." 



late-coloured thoroughfare, running north 
and south for two blocks from Forty- 
ninth to Fifty-first Street, as being in 
striking contrast to the rest of hot and 

180 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

dusty New York. In the book Mrs. 
Peixada's home is identitied as No. 
46; the apartment occupied by Arthur 




MRS. PEIXADA S HOME. H. IIARLAND S MRS. PEIXADA. 

181 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

Ripley and Julian Hetzel being in the 
top floor of No. -13. In reality no 
such numbers exist. But No. 46 was 
spoken of as a corner house, and the 
links of circumstantial evidence scat- 
tered through the book are convincing 
enough to leave little doubt as to its 
identity. From the balcony of the house 
occupied by Mrs. Peixada the characters 
of this story looked down upon the busy 
river, where the tugs and Sound steamers 
kept up a continual puffing and whistling. 
Mr. Harland sees a beautiful mother-of- 
pearl tint in the water, and hears the 
band around the corner grinding out 
selections from Trovatore. Veronika and 
her uncle Tiluski lived in the topmost 
story of the white apartment house on 
Fiftj'-flrst Street, near Second Avenue. 
It was there that Neuman murdered his 
betrothed. 

A few blocks to the west and north, 
on Fifty-seventh Street, is the City Court 
which served Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams 

182 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

ill his story of " Mrs. Harrison Wells's 
Shoes." Farther up, at Sixty-ninth Street 
and Fifth Avenue, opposite the Park, we 




TILUSKI S HOME. — H. II.Vlil.ANDl 
"as it was WKITTKN." 

1«3 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

find the house of John Lennox {David 
Harum). It was on the bridle-path that 
I'uns alongside the Reservoir that took 




SCENE OF J. L. WII.LIAMS'S " MKS. llAliKl.SON WELLS's SHOES." 



place the runaway described by Mr. Ford 
in Tlie Ilonourahle Peter StirliiHj. The 
swan-boats in the little lake at the lower 
end of the Park were the inspiration of 

184 




"van lUBliEll AND THE SWAN-BOATS." — K. II. DAVIS. 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Mr. Davis's fragile and sympathetic 
story of Van Bibber and the little girls 




JOHN LKNNOX's HOUSK. — WliSTCOTX's "DAVID HAKUM." 



from the tenement districts of the down- 
town east side. Directly across the city, 



18^ 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

at Fifty-eighth Street and Eleventh 
Avenue, stood, many years ago, the cow- 
sheds described in Hie Honoiircible Peter 




THE LONti STKETCH BY THE RESERVOIR. P. L. FORI 

"the HONOURAHLE peter STIRLING." 



188 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Stirling. The " swill-milk cases " alluded 
to ill this book actually took place in 
1858; but for the purposes of the story 
Mr. Ford used them while writing of 
the events of the year 1873. The scenes 
of squatter life treated by Mr. Fawcett 
in his Confessions of Claud were laid 
about Sixtieth and Sixty-first streets, 
near the North River. 



IV. HARLEM PIETGHTS — THE NEUTRAL (iROlND 
— SCENES OF CHIMMIE FADDEN — LA- 
GUERRE'S— SLEEPY HOLLOW 

In one of the sketches of Made in 
France, which was a collection of short 
tales from Gruy de Maupassant told with 
a United States twist, the late Henry 
Cuyler Bunner described one of those 
quaint old frame houses with great 
gardens which, until ten or a dozen 
years ago, were to be found here and 
there throughout the upper West Side. 
It was in the garden that the hero of 

189 



NEW YOIiK IN FICTION 

the tale came upon the strange old couple 
pirouetting through their ghostly dance. 




SQUATTER TERRITORY. — EDGAR FAWCETT S 
" THE CONFESSIONS OF CLAUD." 



As to the actual situation of the house 
and garden there was very little said 
positively. It was somewhere west of 

190 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

Central Park, rather far up ; and with 
this as guide the reader who knew this 
part of the city in those days, before the 
sweeping invasion of the real-estate 
agent, the architect, and the mason 
swept away the traces of the island's 
earlier history, may make such selection 
as suits his taste. Whatever the selec- 
tion may be, the reader will not have 
to journey far to find the scenes of Pro- 
fessor Brander Matthews' s Tom Paiild- 
UH/, which were laid about what is 
now the Riverside Drive. The opening 
chapter of the book treated of West 
Ninety-third Street, and years after it 
was written the author took up his 
residence in this street, and there lives 
at the present day. 

Among the parts of New York which 
have been ignored in fiction Harlem is 
strikingly prominent. Perliai)s this is in 
a measure due to the swiftness of its 
growth and the constant changes in its 
architectural aspect and social conditions 

191 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

from year to year. The ubiquitous Mr. 
Fawcett has occasionally alluded to it, 
Mrs. Anna Katharine Grreen has used it 
as the background of one or two of her 
sensations, but it wholly lacks the charm 
of maturity which appeals to the literary 
temperament, and has, justly or unjustly, 
been regarded as dull and commonplace. 
Moving up the Heights, we come to the 
Jumel mansion, frequented by so many 
of the great personages of our national 
history, and one of the reputed places of 
concealment of Fenimore Cooper's Har- 
vey Birch. Beneath the Heights to the 
northwest stretches the broad expanse 
of the Hudson as the Spy and Captain 
Wharton saw it during their flights from 
the Virginian troopers. To the north 
the broken fragments of the Highlands, 
throwing up their lofty heads above 
masses of fog that hung over the water, 
and by which the " course of the river 
could be traced into the bosom of hills 
whose conical summits were grouping 

192 




THE JUiMEL HOUSE. — A REPUTED REFUGE OF HARVEY BIRCH. 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

together, one behind another, in that dis- 
order which might be supposed to have 
succeeded their gigantic but fruitless ef- 
forts to stop the progress of the flood; 
and emerging from these confused piles, 
the river, as if rejoicing at its release 
from the struggle, expanded into a wide 
bay, which was ornamenting into a few 
fertile and low points that jutted humbly 
into its broad basin." Near by are the 
scenes of Janice Meredith when Mr. Paul 
Leicester Ford, in the fifteenth chapter, 
carries his narrative from southern New 
Jersey to the northern end of Manhattan 
Island; whisking the characters of the 
book to Harlem Heights, and showing us 
Washington at a time when the colonial 
cause was beginning to look dark and 
hopeless. A group of horsemen on a 
slight eminence of ground were watch- 
ing the movements of the British men of 
war, and the discomfiture of the raw 
American recruits. Later the action 
shifts to the Roger Morris house, where 

195 



NUW YORK IN FICTION 

Washington had his headquarters and 
Mr. Meredith and his daughter are 
brought to answer to a charge of con- 
veying to the British vastly important 
information as to the lack of powder in 
the American army. 

The country at the northern end of 
Manhattan Island and beyond the Har- 
lem was in a measure the inspiration of 
Fenimore Cooper's The Spy. Every crag 
and valley was the scene of one of the 
skirmishes between partisans of the rival 
causes in the Revolutionary period ; every 
road knew the wanderings of Harvey 
Birch. The opening pages of the book 
find General Washington, under the name 
of Harper, pursuing his way through one 
of the numerous little valleys of West- 
chester, which became after the occupa- 
tion of New York by the British army 
common ground until the end of the war. 
The towns in the southern part of the 
country near the Harlem River were, for 
the most part, under English dominion, 

196 






^ ; 




NEW YORK IX FICTION 



while those of northern Westchester 
were in sympathy with the Revolution- 
ary cause. " The Locusts," the home of 




THE ROAD \V1M)|\<: AKOIM) l.nrLI'^ IIII.I> 

Cuurtesv of (»wiiers <if I'ai'k Hi 



the Whartons, which was a meeting-place 
for the officers of King Greorge's army, 
stood and still stands on the side of a hill 

199 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

overlooking the distant waters of Long 
Island Sonnd, the scene of Water Wifeli. 
" The Locusts " at the present day is oc- 
cupied by descendants of the family that 
Cooper, when living at Closet Hall — the 
home of the Littlepage family in Safans- 
toe — was in the habit of visiting on his 
little journeys inland. The appearance 
of this house, which played so important 
a part in The Spij, has changed but little 
since the time when Cooper knew it. All 
the country to the north of the Harlem, 
stretching from the Hudson to the Sound, 
is rich with associations of Cooper's first 
great historical novel. Near by at " The 
Four Corners " is the site where stood 
the building from which Harvey Birch 
escaped disguised in Betty Flanagan's 
clothes. The village of Four Corners 
was a cluster of small and dilapidated 
houses at a spot where two roads inter- 
sected at right angles. The hilly country 
between Spuyten Duyvil and Yonkers 
was the scene of the Hight and wander- 

200 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

ings of the pedler and Captain Wharton, 
after the escape from the farmhouse m 




HARVEY birch's CAVE. WASHINGTON ROCKS. 

Covirtesv of owuers of Park Hill. 



which the Enghsh officer was imprisoned 
awaiting execution, and from which he 
was rescued by Harvey's strategy. The 

201 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

cave in which they took refuge when pur- 
sued by the troop of American horse was 
in the Washington rocks at Park Hill. 
Turning from the fiction which finds its 
background in the last years of the eigh- 
teenth century to fiction which very dis- 
tinctively belongs to the closing years of 
the nineteenth century, we find a few 
miles from " The Locusts " the house 
which was the scene of the exploits, bel- 
ligerent and amorous, of Edward W. 
Townsend's Cliimmie Fadden. The little 
Bowery boy, it will be remembered, after 
his reclamation by Miss Fannie was 
taken as footman to the country res- 
idence of " His Whiskers." It was there 
that he entered polite society, and wooed 
and won " De Duchess." The original of 
the country home of " His Whiskers " 
was the residence of Mr. Grillig, ex-Com- 
modore of the Larchmont Yacht Club, at 
Larchmont, overlooking the Sound. To 
this great house the author of Chimmie 
Fadden has been a frequent visitor. Fifty 

202 




ULSIDI.NCE Ol- " HIS WHISKEKS. — 
" CHIMMIE FAUDKN 



K. \V. Tow .\.SENU S 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

or a hundred feet away from the northern 
end of the house is the stable to which 
" His Whiskers " was in the habit of tak- 
ing Chames whenever he deemed that the 
young man was in need of more vigorous 
redemption than Miss Fannie's instruc- 
tion could supply. 

On the banks of the Bronx, sung by 
the aforesaid Chimmie, was Laguerre's, so 
well beloved by Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, 
who characterized it as the "most delight- 
ful of French inns in the quaintest of 
French settlements." From the windows 
of the passing railway trains one may see 
the "tall trees trailing their branches in 
the still stream — hardly a dozen yards 
wide — the white ducks paddling together, 
and the queer punts drawn up on the 
shelving shore or tied to soggy, patched- 
up landing stairs." Alighting from the 
train at Williamsbridge, crossing the 
water, passing the tapestry factory, a 
short walk brings one to the former 
home of Henri Lemaire, the original of 

205 



NEW YORK IX FICTION 

Francois Laguerre. Farther down the 
road there is a cafe very much like 
Laguerre's, only more modern and pre- 
tentious, and consequently less pictur- 
esque. Like Laguerre in the story, 
Lemaire was a maker of passe-partouts. 
He is still living, and has a shop some- 
where on Sixth Avenue. It is only ten 
or fifteen years since Laguerre's was 
unique in its mouldiness and charm. 
But now everything is much changed. 
The old house and the punts are going to 
decay, the stream is bit by bit losing its 
quaintness. 

No portion of New York or its envi- 
ronments has been more sympathetically 
and tenderly treated than in Washington 
Irving' s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Fol- 
lowing the post road to the north from 
Tarrytown, one may, from the countless 
associations of stone and wood, readily 
re-evoke the quaint figure of Ichabod 
Crane astride his horse Grunpowder in 
the wild fiight from the Galloping Hes- 

200 








the most delightful of french inns. — f. hol'kinson smith 
"a day at laguekke's." 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

sian. The little valley among high hills 
and the small brook gliding through it 
remain much the same as in the days 
when Irving was living at Sunny side. 
The old church where Ichabod instructed 
Katrina Van Tassel in psalmody is still 
to be seen surrounded by locust-trees 
and lofty elms from among which " its 
decent whitewashed walls shine modestly 
forth, like Christian purity beaming 
through the shades of retirement. A 
gentle slope descends from it to a silver 
sheet of water, bordered by high trees, 
between which peeps may be caught at 
the blue hills of the Hudson." This 
church was built in the seventeenth cen- 
tury. From the surrounding churchyard 
the Headless Horseman was said to issue 
nightly. Ichabod' s fright began when 
passing the tree by which Major Andre 
was captured. His experience with the 
Headless Horseman began at the bridge, 
about two hundred yards farther on. It 
was not until the old church had been 

14 209 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

reached that the Headless Horseman, 
rising in his stirrups, hurled the pump- 
kin which laid the fleeing schoolmaster 




THE OLD MILL. — GEOFFREV CKAYOn'S "CHRONICLES. 



low. The old Mott homestead, believed 
to have been the home of Katrina Van 
Tassel, was recently destroyed. The 
schoolhouse in which Ichabod Crane 

210 




" flocks of wurre ducks paddling togethfr." — v. horkinson 
smith's "a day at laguekre's." 



NEW YORK TN FICTION 

taught and which was harassed by Brom 
Bones and his wild cronies, has also 
passed away. Near by we find the 
ruins of the haunted mill of Geoffrey 
Crayon' s Chronicles. 

V. GREENPOINT— SCENES OF ^' TOM GROGAN " 

In An Anibitioas Woman Edgar Faw- 
cett gave us a description of an outlying 
portion of New York strikingly adequate 
in its scope and conviction. Of Green- 
point he says that its sovereign dreari- 
ness still remains. He dwells at length 
on its melancholy, its ugliness, its torpor, 
its neglect. To him it always had a 
certain " goblin hideousness keenly pic- 
turesque." When writing An Ambit ions 
Woman he went time and time again to 
Greenpoint to study its conditions and 
atmosphere, — to get all its tragi-comic 
suggestiveness well in memory. The 
background of the story — the black, 
loamy meadow, and the sodden bridge, 

213 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

and the little inky creek, and the iris- 
necked flock of pigeons, and the dull. 




THE INKY CHEEK AND FLAT MARSH LAND. EDGAR 

FAWCETT's "an ASIBITIOIJS WOMAN." 



dirty smoke from the factories — was all 
very real to him. 



214 




5 < 



M W 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

The Twinings lived, in a three-story 
wooden house of a yellowish drab colour, 
with trellised piazza, Corinthian pillars, 
and high basement windows, in one of 
the retired side streets of Greenpoint. 
A few such houses are still to be found, 
but the book offers no evidence that the 
author had in mind any particular struc- 
ture. Claire Twining, before the en- 
counter with Josie which marked such 
a crisis in her life, was standing on a 
little hill which overlooked the lights of 
the city. This hill, from which Mr. Faw- 
cett described his heroine as " watching 
the wrinkled river, drab and tremulous, 
the boats, and beyond the church-spires 
of New York," was probably Pottery 
Hill, which was razed about ten years 
ago. Crossing two rivers and the city 
between, we find at Hoboken the little 
green park described in the same author's 
A Daughter of Silence. This book was 
a favourite novel of the late Colonel 
Ingersoll. In this park, which may be 

217 



iV^^Tf YORK IN FICTION 

seen from the river, Griiy Arbutlinot 
and Brenda first speak. 




),M (.Uix; AN S HolISE. 



The openmg pages of F. Hopkmson 
Smith's To}ii Grogan deal with the work 
about the Lighthouse Department and 

218 




THE ANUKE THEE AND MONIMF.NT. — IKVING'S "LEGEND OF 
SLEEPV HOLLOW." 



NEW YOBK IN FICTION 

the Grovernmeut dock at 8t. George, 
Staten Island. Babcock, building the 
sea wall, comes upon Tom Grogan in 
the depot yard with its coal docks and 
machme shops. Over the hill in Staple- 




TOM GROGAN S BAKN. 



ton, thhily disguised in the story as 
Rockville, was Tom Grogan' s house and 
stable>s. The house, a plain, square frame 
dwelling, with front and rear verandas, 
protected by the arching branches of a 

221 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

big sycamore-tree and surrounded by a 
small garden filled with flaming dahlias 
and chrysanthemums, is to-day occupied 
by the daughter and son-in-law of the 
original of the character, w^ho herself 
lives in a house of recent erection only a 
stone's throw distant. Directly in the 
rear of this house may be found the 
stables, the stable yard, and the pump 
and horse trough, all of which play a 
conspicuous part in the tale. It was 
while in the larger of the two stables 
that Tom was struck down by the ham- 
mer in the hand of Dan McGaw, and 
through the window at the side came the 
light by which she saw his face before 
the blow fell. The long room in which 
Judge Bowker gave the decision which 
settled finally the question of the award 
of the contract, and allowed Tom Grrogan 
the right to use her husband's signature 
in carrying on her business, was not, as 
might be supposed, in the Town Hall 
proper, but in a room directly over the 

222 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

Stapleton Post-Office. Across the square 
is a one-story frame structure, which was 
the original of O'Leary's saloon, where 
McGaw and Crimniins hatched their 
plots against Tom. The experiences 
which went to make this book were 
gathered during Mr. Smith's connection 
with the Government Lighthouse De- 
partment as contractor. It was then that 
he came in contact with Mrs. Bridget Mor- 
gan, stevedore, the original Tom Grogan. 

Down the Atlantic Highlands are the 
scenes of Fenimore Qoo^qv' ^ Water Witch, 
and out from Sandy Hook is the Scot- 
land Lightship, thoughts of which in- 
spired Mr. Richard Harding Davis when 
writing one of his best and most charm- 
ing scenes of love-making, — that of Rob- 
ert Clay and Hope on the north-bound 
steamer off the coast of South America. 

A very few miles inland are the scenes 

of the greater part of Mr. Paul Leicester 

Ford's Janice Meredith, — many of them 

comparatively the same as in the days 

16 225 



NFW YORK IN FICTION 

when Greneral Washington was in full 
flight across the State on his way to 
Philadelphia and Valley Forge. The old 
church where Janice and her family wor- 
shipped was destroyed by the British 
soldiers during the Revolution, and the 
tavern frequented by Fownes and Joe 
Bagby long ago passed away from the 
eyes of men. And yet there is much to 
re-evoke the atmosphere of the novel. 
Nassau Hall still stands as solidly and 
majestically as at the time when it served 
as barracks for the soldiers of both causes. 
Here at New Brunswick is the same Rari- 
tan, and the same broad fields, and be- 
yond, in the distance, is the mountain 
range of the tale. 

After turning over the last page of 
Janice Meredith^ the present writer took 
up Tlie Histo)-}} of Union and Middlesex 
Counties^ and reading through the chap- 
ters devoted to the city of New Bruns- 
wick and the surrounding country during 
the War of the Revolution, found it 
226 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

difficult to determine just where, in the 
romance, fact ended and fiction began. 
So careful and accurate was Mr. Ford 
in the building of his story that the very 
names of the book have the same rinff 




'• NASSAU HALL, THEN SERVING AS BARRACKS FOR THE FORCE 
CENTRED THERE." " JANICE MEREDITH," CH. XXXII. 



as the names to be found in the war and 
court records of Middlesex County. We 
read in the novel of the troubles Lambert 
Meredith had with his Whig neighbours, 
and then find in a printed fragment of a 
letter of a British officer that " one of 

227 



NEW YORK IN FICTION 

our friends had got several thousand in 
the back country brought over to our 
interests; but about a month ago a mob 




"glimpses of the raritan, over fields of sturble and 
cornstacks, broken by patches of timber and or- 
chard." — "janice meredith," ch. iii. 



of about one hundred dissohite fellows 
surrounded his house, with an intention 
to tar and feather him, upon which he 
came out armed, and while he was rea- 

22« 



JSTEW YORK IN FICTION 

soning the case with them at the door he 
was knocked down with the butt end of 
a musket, then laid Uke a calf across a 
horse, and tied to a tree while yet insen- 
sible, and tarred and feathered." This 
sort of thing was going on all over 
the country; the Tories, on the other 
hand, retaliating whenever they had the 
opportunity. 

Greenwood, the home of the Merediths, 
by the river road, some four miles from 
the town of Brunswick, was purely an 
imaginary structure, and the accompany- 
ing picture of the house is as much the 
creation of the artist as of the author. 
In fact, there are a few little details, 
such as the relations of the house and 
the barn and the hedge, which fail to 
agree with the text. The interior of the 
Grreenwood of the story was modelled 
after the old Ford home; the exterior 
after a house in Morris Plains. 



231 



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